Social Networking Sites – New platform for viruses ?
Since about a year or so, we have a phenomenal rise in the use of social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter. From a teenager to a grandma, a huge percent of people have their account on Facebook.com and keep in touch with their friends and family members.
The recent attack of a new virus on Facebook accounts that sends an email message to the friends in the list with a link to some malicious site is what prompted me to write this article. Over the last few days I have received several messages from friends to visit a link on youtube (as the message title), but the link refers to some IP addresses. All those who have followed the link have successfully received the free gift of their account being hijacked or their computer got infected.
Over the last few years there has been a decrease in the amount of malware outbreak via email messages, thanks a lot to the sophisticated spam filters and anti virus tools. With the increase in popularity and adaptation of the social networking sites/tools along with their defense systems still in infancy, they have become a easy breading ground for viruses and malware.
I recommend people to not sign up any applications/scripts outside the core offering of Facebook or Twitter and not to follow the links from friends blindly.
Hope this initial hiccups would not cause these sites to crumble under their own weight.
PS: The logos of Twitter and Facebook are the copyrights of the respective organizations.