CYBERSPACE — Social networking: Everybody’s doing it these days — including the guys in black hats. Along with everyone else, hackers and malware developers have embraced social-networking and video-sharing sites to promote their nefarious wares.YouTube, for example, bears a video that serves as an advertisement for an Albanian hacker group intent on broadening its influence in the world of computer crime. Threatening and malevolent in tone, the video exhibits a young man pointing a gun at the camera, as well as cut shots of a table filled with loot and copious links to the hackers’ website. At the site, the group offers all sorts of evil opportunities to anyone willing to pay its price.

In a world thoroughly dependent upon the internet for communication and commerce, computer crime is a thriving business. Once difficult to find except through friends of friends of friends, the bad guys have come out of the shadows to promote themselves in plain site on blogs, video-sharing venues and sites like MySpace and Facebook. One might worry that such boldness would make them easier to catch. In fact, however, the black hats aren’t too concerned about discovery, because in most countries, including the U.S., selling malware and other cybercrime tools isn’t illegal — only using the devices is against the law.

Most social-networking and video-sharing sites say the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows them to exercise only limited control over what users upload to their networks. However, they will investigate content when other users complain.