The year 2009 saw high-profile attacks against social-networking sites — and we ain’t seen nothing yet. Security researchers and social-networking gurus expect more attacks — and more sophisticated attacks, no less — on popular social-networking sites in the year ahead.
The impetus for malicious hackers begins with the sheer numbers. Facebook now boasts more than 350 million users. MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster, Badoo and the scores of other growing social networks online mean plenty of opportunity for cybercriminals.
“Criminal toolkits are evolving rapidly to use new technologies that increase the
sophistication of the attack — leaving even more users blind to the risks,” security researchers from McAfee Labs explained in the company’s 2010 Threat Predictions report. “Malware authors love following the social-networking buzz and hot spots of activity. That will continue in 2010.”
Twitter Trepidations
As Google cracks down on search-engine poisoning, McAfee expects Twitter and similar services to be attractive targets for malware authors. But it’s not just the social-networking sites themselves that are attack vehicles, it’s the third-party tools that consumers use to communicate through them — namely, URL-shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com.
“These services now appear in all sorts of communications — making it easier than
ever to mask the URLs that users are asked to click,” McAfee security researchers noted. “This trick will play a more predominant role in 2010. It’s the perfect avenue to direct users to web sites that they would normally be wary about visiting.”
As user expectations of Web 2.0 services evolve, McAfee expects to see a growing number of rogue services emerge to try to capture credentials and data. The company warns that the widespread availability of stolen credentials could make it easy to launch and share rogue applications across social-networking populations.
“Wherever and whenever a trusted mainstream web site distributes or promotes third-party content,…