San Francisco - Web 2.0 technologies may be laying the groundwork for a new generation of hacker tools, a noted security researcher said Wednesday.

Google Mashups, RSS feeds, search, all of these can be misused by hackers to distribute malware, attack Web surfers and communicate with botnets, said Petko Petkov, a security researcher speaking at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) U.S. 2007 conference, held on eBay's campus We all know that Web 2.0 gives the security community a challenge but what can we do? Do the old security practices of strong firewall, validating input, etc continue to protect web servers in this age of web 2.0 or do we need to research new ways of protection?

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