What keeps Facebook information safe from botnets and infected computers?

Question

I've read a few articles which suggest that somewhere around 30-50% of PC's are infected with malware. Supposing that means that hackers then have control of those computers to do as they please (root access), do they then have the ability to make requests to websites with the browsers saved passwords (or simply by using the credentials gathered from a keylogger, with the request originating from that users pc)?

My thinking behind this is then they could get into Facebook (among other sites) and "crawl & scrape" that persons friends data. Given that most users have hundreds of friends, and that a large percentage of computers are infected, I would imagine it be possible for hackers then to scrape facebook for virtually all user information (especially given how loose people's security settings are on facebook anyways).

I would imagine Facebook has measures in place to try to stop rapid/bot like crawling, but with enough time and effort It seems likely to me that an entire network of friends could be crawled and scraped in this manner.

Is this likely, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Well, yes, hackers can extract all the information on almost every Facebook users, assuming that:

• hackers controlling botnets collude toward this unified goal, as members of the Worldwide League of Hackerdom;
• the data people post on Facebook is deemed sufficiently interesting to motivate the said hackers into such a coordinated effort.

Belief that either condition is true, is quite representative of how people think in 2013.