Social Malice

According to social networking data gathered by Barracuda networks, one in 60 Facebook posts are of the malicious sort, and LinkedIn users feel the safest—but not for along apparently. If you aren’t yet aware, haven’t been affected by it, or simply do not have one of the three big social networking accounts, you should know that there is indeed a dark side to the booming online networking business today. Other than Facebook, it was reported that Twitter also had one in 100 tweets being malicious.

With 40% of users reporting that they feel unsafe on the service, Facebook leads the way with the least confident users on its site. 28% of Twitter’s users feel that way, and LinkedIn follows up with 14%. Just because the users feel safest on LinkedIn, it doesn’t translate to the safety being kept. It’s inevitable that the site will become a big target for cybercrime. The damage that could potentially be done to accounts on LinkedIn is high for employee misinformation and business disruption in general, according to Daniel Peck, who is a senior research scientist with Barracuda Labs. “I think there will be a lot of social attacks there” said Peck.

Some other relevant findings from Barracuda Labs that were included in the article are as follows: “Interestingly, most users say the important factors to consider when joining a social network are security (92%), that their friends use it (91%), privacy (90%), and ease of use (87%). More than 90% have received spam over a social network, and more than half have experienced phishing attacks. More than 20% have received malware, 16.6% have had their account used for spamming, and about 13% have had their account hijacked or their password stolen. More than half are unhappy with Facebook's privacy controls.
Meanwhile, Barracuda counted 43% of Twitter accounts as "true users" with real followers and regular tweets, and 57% as "not true users"--either spam bots or inactive accounts.
Attackers abuse Twitter in much the same way that they engage in search-engine poisoning, according to Peck, casting a wide net and hoping to get more eyeballs. "Facebook manipulates trust more--your friends are people you make eye contact with," he said” (BrainYard). 


Deb Donston-Miller, a contributing editor to the BrainYard (site at which this article can be read), commented below the article stating, “The big problem is that, if your public social network account gets hacked, there's nothing a person or company can do. You're kind of at the mercy of Facebook or Google or whatever. It's bad enough for an individual, but once organizations come to depend more and more on public social networks for marketing, help desk, etc., the threat will expand.” I couldn’t possibly agree anymore wholeheartedly with her comment so I had to quote her. Hackers today are better than ever, and if a company has put most of their marketing efforts into a social networking site such as LinkedIn, it makes them easy targets for experienced hackers, and could result in bad business for the proposed company if such an attack/hijack were to occur.  I don't believe that safety issues will get enough users to quit using Facebook or other sites, but from a company's standpoint I can certainly see reason for concern.

Social Malice