Hackers and spammers are concentrating on Web 2.0 and social media sites to spread malware with harmful sites increasing by 225% in the second half of 2009 against the same period a year ago (2008). This official confirmation of the rise in attacks comes from security specialist Websense in its State Of The Internet report for 2009.
The report reveals that web 2.0 site are the prime target of hackers and cyber criminals with almost 95% of user-generated comments to chat-rooms, message boards and blogs being harmful or spam. Also, Websense Security Labs disclosed that 13.7% of queries looking for news\buzz words (defined by Google & Yahoo Buzz Trends) resulted in malware. Search engine optimisation poisoning attacks hit the top searches allowing attackers to drive traffic to their websites.
The perpetrators of these attacks are exploiting user trust in social media sites and one amazing statistic contained in the Websense report is that 71% of websites with harmful code were authentic websites but they had been hacked.
Another worrying, but hardly surprising fact, is that several thousands of Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail mail accounts had been compromised and password stolen and posted online. This led to a rise in the amount of spam e-mails with Websense Security Labs estimating that 85.5% of all e-mails were spam.
What this says to me is that while people seem to blame technology for security errors it is largely down to human error that there are security breaches. I utilise Zonealarm as a firewall, Avast as my anti-virus program, have Spywareblaster running in the background and carry out weekly scans using Spybot Search and Destroy – but I still cannot afford to be complacent so I have the Web of Trust service running in Firefox and Chrome.
What security measures do you have on your PC to protect your privacy?
