Social Networking Threats on the Rise

In its latest annual security threat report UK antivirus vendor Sophos warns that social networking threats have been on an upward trend since the beginning of 2009.

Being the world's largest social networking site, with over 600 million users as of January 2011, Facebook is one of the primary targets for cybercriminals.

A Sophos poll revealed that, by December 2010, 67% of social networking users have been spammed at least once.

That's 10% more people than in December 2009, and double the number of individuals affected by such threats in April 2009.

These numbers are clearly reflected in the flurry of survey scams circulating daily on Facebook, especially since the middle of last year.

These days most of them rely on rogue applications to send the spam from compromised accounts, but older ones tricked users into doing it manually.

The evolution of responses about phishing and malware attacks on social networks follows a similar pattern.

In April 2009, 21% of users had encountering such attacks. Their number grew to 30% until December 2009 and 43% until December 2010.

Malware poll results showed 40% social networking users affected in December last year, an increase of 4% over December 2009 and 19% over April 2009.

"This isn't just a problem for home users. Many people check their social networking accounts from the workplace, making the sites a potential vector for attacks against businesses," notes Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos.

Around 59% of surveyed companies said they were worried about employees endangering corporate security because of their social networking activities, however, less than 25% of them blocked access to such sites.

Another Sophos poll from the middle of 2010 revealed that 95% of users would like Facebook to detect and stop likejacking scams faster. Unfortunately, things have gotten a lot worse since then and no significant improvements have been made towards combating such threats.