Facebook profiles have become a bit of a commodity these days for crooks looking to cash in on unsuspecting members of the public. From spam messages to social engineering scams, the holy grail for any attacker is open access to a person's profile. From here, they can capture details about a person's private life along with their family, friends, business contacts and everything they require to pull the perfect scam.

On the same note I paid a visit to the Apple Store in London today and the last thing I expected to see was outright disregard by the public for the security of their Facebook accounts.

In the shop there are demo units, with a live Internet connection, of the various gadgets made and sold by Apple. Of particular interest was an iPhone demo unit that I had a play with and spotted Facebook at the top of the history list in Safari. A few taps later, I was looking at the Facebook profile of a tourist who had visited earlier that morning and able to look up or amend any private details I wanted.

Of course, the profile was in a foreign language so I couldn't understand a thing, but the potential for mischief is there. After logging in on the demo unit, the tourist had closed Safari but left his login details saved after getting bored of fiddling with the phone. The next person to visit the site (i.e, me!) can then access the page and leave a little note on his wall telling him what a silly thing he had done. What scares me the most is how many of the demo units in the store were holding the private details of users of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

If you want to protect your social networking accounts, take extra care on public computers or mobile devices! Always press log out and do not just close the browser or app!