Social media is increasingly becoming fertile ground for hackers to attack companies with spam and malware, according to a report released Monday by a security firm.
According to a Sophos survey of nearly 500 companies worldwide, the number of firms that reported attacks through social media increased by 70 percent compared with the year before.
IT professionals became more concerned that employees’ everyday actions on social-networking sites are exposing companies to attacks. Sixty percent of interviewees said they were most concerned about security vulnerabilities in Facebook.
Criminals banked on the inherent trust people have on their contacts, said Sophos senior security adviser Chet Wisniewski.
“Social media provides criminals with an opportunity. When I get a message on Facebook from my wife and I see a link, I’m going to click it,” Wisniewski said.
Online lures known as phishing schemes and malware attacks – malicious programs that aim to steal private information or control a victim’s computers – expanded their presence in social media sites by around 10 percent in the past eight months.
Sophos identified 50,000 variants of existing viruses in 2009, almost twice as much as the previous year.
Spam reports, an epidemic that e-mail providers have been considerably effective in staving off through filters, rose 23.6 percent in the same period.
“People reporting spam went from a third to half of all companies. Two out of five are having issues of malware coming from social media,” Wisniewski said.
The troublesome Koobface worm also continued to evolve in sophistication. In 2009, the worm became capable of automatically registering a Facebook account, befriending strangers and posting malicious content on the walls of potential victims, the report said.
Other smaller, regional social-networking sites are also at risk of becoming attack platforms for the theft of consumer or corporate information.
Although a third of the firms said they have blocked Facebook from employees’ computers because it hampers productivity, barring social media entirely is no longer an easy choice as many professionals regularly use social media to stay connected to their customers.
Source ~ San Francisco Chronicle
