Social Networking Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks This Year — Experts Warn
A group of security researchers and social networking experts warned about the imminent hacker attacks on social networking websites, saying that more sophisticated malicious software will hound operations this year.
According to experts, the boom in the number of social network users will also trigger the rise in number of attacks to websites like Facebook, Twitter, and other related online sites.
It will be recalled that 2009 saw it share of attacks where majority of the targets were individual homepages. But experts said that it relatively small in nature compared to what hackers are preparing for this year.
“These cyber-criminals and their toolkits are evolving in an outstanding pace. The rapid changes in technologies also make attacks more sophisticated, which leave online users blind to risks that they face,” McAfee Labs researchers said in a statement.
The online security firm also said that “hot spots” and “buzzes” in social networking websites are continuously being monitored by malware authors, making active users more susceptible to attacks.
With Google beefing up its security to shield its search engine homepage from attacks, hackers are expected to shift its sight to more vulnerable targets like Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking websites.
However, the experts warned that it is not only social networking websites that are vulnerable from such malwares, saying that third-party tools and other URL-shortening services, used to communicate with the homepages, would also suffer similar problems.
“These third-party services are easier to attack. They are more susceptible to be overtaken by malwares since cyber-criminals can easily mask the URL the users usually click,” the security firm added.
Instead on logging-in on websites that they prefer, users are actually being redirected by hackers to websites containing malwares. Users are also giving away personal information such as username and passwords when they click in on these bogus websites.
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