The major changes Facebook introduced at last week's f8 developer conference have met with mixed reactions from Facebook users—and could open the site to more security risks, according to Bitdefender.

The Internet security software developer said Monday that Facebook's changes may expose users to targeted attacks from cybercriminals, spambot infestations like the ones that plague Twitter, interactive scams, and other unwelcome threats.

Facebook is now "silently pushing" Smart Lists, according to Bitdefender, which means users are being encouraged more than ever to publish information about themselves such as places of employment that can be indexed and potentially used for high-level targeted attacks.

The site's new Twitter-like subscriber feature, meanwhile, makes it more "open to spambots and 'how to get more subscribers' schemes," Bitdefender said in a statement. "Copying Twitter features may also mean importing Twitter scams."

Bitdefender also cast a wary eye at Timeline, the massive overhaul of the core Facebook user profile that is being tested in beta now and will start being rolled out on Sept. 30.

The updates, friends, photos, and more that make up a Facebook user's profile were available for anyone to see before Timeline, depending on how a user restricted their profile's visibility through Facebook's privacy settings. Timeline doesn't change that, but it does make "the open story" of a user's life easier to track, because that's what it is designed to do, according to Bitdefender.

That could be problematic for users who don't adjust their privacy settings to limit who can view their Timeline. But potentially more troubling for security reasons is Facebook's new integration of apps on its Timeline profiles through Open Graph.

Open Graph gives app developers the unprecedented ability to entangle their apps with a user's Timeline profile, according to the security vendor. That means that those who have installed an app don't just interact with friends inside the app, as in the current structure. Instead, the app lives on a user's wall, "so anyone who interacts with the user profile interacts with the app."

"Considering the short lifetime of spammy apps, this could boost their efficiency," Bitdefender says. "Of course, this feature is just starting, so it will likely take a while until the scammers exploit it. But every successful viral feature has eventually been exploited by social media scammers."
