Social Networking Sites Are Possible Targets: McAfee


In a report, McAfee Inc said that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter are easy targets for cybercriminals in the year 2010.

Recently, as seen their is flood like situation in apps world on Facebook and in other services too, like Orkut, Hi5 and many more like them are a perfect medium for cybercriminals, who can take advantage of person trusting person to click links they might other wise treat carefully. Since web users generally trust on friends who sends links to them by their contacts.

In an press release, Senior Vice President of McAfee, Jeff Green, said that “We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications and more advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cyber security community.”

When it comes to figures, till date Facebook have 350 million registered users which are easy targets. McAfee also said that URL shorteners, which are widely used over Twitter due to 140 character limitation, are easy takes for cybercriminals.

Another security company, Symantec, reported that, In 2010, URL shortener services will "become the phisher's best friend."

Other soft target for cybercriminals is Adobe applications such as Acrobat reader and flash, this applications are widely used all over world, expected by McAfee lab.

McAfee also predicated that, In 2010 will be good year for law enforcement's fight against cybercrime.

8 comments:

iProficient SEO said...

No doubt, Social networking site will be primary target for malicious users, but I guess, owners of SNS are trying there best to keep them away and not compromising with privacy.
Short URL has given a boost to spam sites since there is now what to figure out through short URL.

Matthew Share said...

I do agree with the facts that social networking site are soft targets for hackers since many of us are not aware about possible threats and do not take per-cautionary steps... which directly or in-directly helps hack to get through loopholes ...

fleet tracking said...

Really true that malicious users must target social networking sites for malware splitation.......over the networks.........

programmes tv said...

Yes the article is really true! It is realy easy to get in trouble with the help of your friends, been there done that!
All in all, nice articles!

Cheers!

5 on demand said...

Well written article! From where I stand, it is very easy to spread some unwelcome threat using social networks!

programmes tv said...

I think reading this article was a sigh! Just got a virus yesterday from a friend on Facebook!

Makeup Artist said...

really informative post now i pay attention regarding this

Chase said...

It makes sense, people share a lot of really personal information on these sites, probably more than enough for identity theft, be very carefull on these sites.

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