Spammers to Target Facebook More-And-More During 2010

As online criminals are increasingly attacking social networking websites, an upsurge of spam mails has been predicted for 2010.

Matthew Prince, Professor of Cyber Law at Chicago (US) based John Marshall Law School and Co-Creator of Project Honey Pot, has said that spammers are attempting to gain users' trust targeting Facebook to make an entry, as reported by Tgdaily on January 25, 2010.

Spammers trick users into following web-links which download malware on their PCs so that the online criminals can capture personal information like passwords and banking details.

Security researchers have explained that e-mail scams such as these are disguised as messages from financial institutions, particularly banks. However, spammers have been targeting social networks too. People using Facebook, which supports 350 Million members globally, have greater possibility to answer e-mails which seem to have come from their friends.

According to the researchers, fraudsters have also used Facebook to execute '419' scams. In these scams, a user of Facebook is deceptively made to divulge his account login credentials, or a keylogger malware is secretly installed on his computer to steal his login credentials.

In the meantime, a report from the Internet security company McAfee agreed with what Prince warned.

The report concluded that the increasing number of software programs on Facebook and other social networking services would prove a suitable medium for cyber attackers. The criminals would exploit the trust between friends who might proceed to follow web-links that otherwise would have been avoided, as reported by Tgdaily on January 25, 2010.

Indeed, malicious bots have almost increased four times in number each year since 2004. In 2009, almost 400,000 bots actively carried out malicious activity daily, while millions of bots remained operational during any month.

The security specialists stated that during 2008, Facebook phishing e-mails were virtually absent. But today Facebook is the second largest target organization for phishers. Moreover, if this tendency persisted, then the organization could reach the top most position during 2010, the specialists warned.

Thus, they advise that users should be cautious while browsing social-networking sites, especially Facebook.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 2/3/2010