Recent activity has shown us that we are becoming more and more involved in social networking. We can tell people what we're doing, in a matter of seconds and share pictures, events and blogs with family members, friends or followers, at a moments notice. Today, people have more freedom of speech and expressing themselves than any other point in history. With this great freedom, comes criminals that take advantage of the system.
Recently hackers attacked users on Twitter, inserting a virus through a message, giving the hacker control of the infected computers. Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks said he found a Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious websites, where they download programs that steal banking passwords.
The technique Nazario described isn't sophisticated, and a couple hundred infected computers is small when some botnets contain hundreds of thousands of infected PCs, but it shows how criminals are finding inventive ways to exploit legitimate social networking services to help with their dirty work. One reason social networks are an attractive target for crooks is because their content is hard to monitor, and because people click on lots of links inside their accounts, which is a key way computer infections are spread.
An annual security report being released on the 15th, by technology titan Cisco, warns that banks and online social networks are prime targets for increasingly sophisticated cyber crooks. "Criminals have been taking note of the large crowds in social-networking sites," said Cisco security researcher Scott Olechowski. "They steal them with various techniques."
Cisco estimates that a Koobface computer worm, named as a play on social networking hot spot "Facebook," has infected more than three million computers since it first appeared in 2008. Koobface is malicious code that steals social networking account credentials, logs into profiles and sends "friends" messages along the lines of wanting to share scintillating online videos. Links enclosed in the messages lead to bobby-trapped web pages that trick visitors into infecting their machines with copies of the worm.
Business computers can wind up infected because one of every 50 "clicks" in the workplace is to social-networking websites, according to Cisco.
"The blending of social media for business and pleasure increases the potential for network security troubles, and people, not technology, can often be the source," said Cisco fellow Patrick Peterson.
"Without proper cognisance of security threats, our natural inclination to trust our 'friends' can result in exposing ourselves, home computers and corporate networks to malware."
The potential for workplace computers to be infected through a social-networking attack is all the more disturbing given the rise of a computer Trojan named Zeus crafted to digitally loot money from banks.
Once in computers, Zeus can swipe information and alter what is seen in web browsers so that people tending to online banking see correct balances on screen while accounts are actually being emptied by cyber thieves.
In conclusion, it is becoming increasingly easy for office computers to become infected with data stealing viruses. This data can include bank acount information, local passwords to software, wich might contain someone else's personal data, or your own private data, such as social security numbers, phone numbers or medical records for you or maybe even your children. It's important that we speak to our employees, reinforcing the need for them to stay off the internet, even during lunch, if it's not work related and keeping our computers monitored and checked by a competent, trained professional.