Police in Italy are investigating a Virtual burglary that occurred within the popular Facebook Game Pet Society.

Pet Society is a social pet simulation game from Playfish that allows players to decorate and furnish virtual houses and purchase virtual clothes for their virtual pets.

Paola Letizia of Palermo, Italy, stated in a report to police that somehow a hacker managed to clean out her virtual home within the game, stealing everything but her blue cat that lived there.

The thief stole the virtual furniture, virtual clothes and virtual art with which 44-year-old Letizia had furnished her seven room home with. The cost of the items are believed to have totaled $140.

“I don’t think it matters that the flat only exists in Facebook,” Letizia was reported to have told the Italian media, “It is real to me and I have suffered a real loss.”

Maybe Pet Society can charge an extra fee for placing virtual security guards outside these virtual houses.

Firesheep, A new Firefox plugin created by Eirc Butler that enables users to hack into the likes of Facebook and Twitter accounts when used on a public WiFi network. The plugin has already been downloaded over 110,000 times. The plugin takes advantage of the fact that cookies from these websites are sent over the network in plain text and not encrypted. By simply grabbing the cookie it enables the hacker to login to the account of the unsuspecting user.

This plugin enables the average Joe with no hacking skills or capabilities to gain access to your social network account.

There are a number of ways to circumvent such an attack, for corporate users through VPN’s or SSH tunneling but for the every day user HTTPS Everywhere is an option.

By enabling the average user to simply download and install this exploit it may force Facebook & Twitter to enhance the security of their platforms.

Instructions on how to install the plugin if your using Windows:

Simply go to the following address:

http://github.com/codebutler/firesheep

• Click on downloads
• Download the firesheep-0.1-1.xpi file
• Go to tools and Add-ons in Firefox
• Drag the firesheep-0.1-1.xp file into the box.
• Couldn’t be easier!

If your the type of person that logs onto Facebook and announces to the world that you’re off on holidays for the week, this could end up being used as intelligence by local burglars.

In a recent news story by WMUR Channel 9 News in New Hampshire, three local men, Mario Rojas, Leonardo Barroso and Victor Rodriguez, have burglarised more than 18 homes in the Nashua area of New Hampshire simply by checking status updates on Facebook and then breaking into the houses of victims who had updated their social network status announcing that they were not at home.

Police were reported to have recovered between $100,000 and $200,000 worth of stolen property resulting from the investigation.

According to the New Hampshire police, investigators were able to track down the burglars by listening for the sound of a specific kind of firework that had been stolen from one home. As soon as they heard it, they were able to locate the suspects and recover the loot.