Higher Internet Activities Create Greater Risks for Users

Webroot, an Internet security company, released the second annual report in the last week of March 2010. According to the report, activities on Internet have been continuously increasing that might lead to more security risks.

As per the 2010 survey, more and more users have developed safe behavior such as blocking their profiles from being viewed via public search engine. But the grim side is that more than 25% of users haven't altered their default privacy settings. In excess of three quarter of users have showed indifference towards imposing restrictions on who can view their activities.

This is indeed a point of concern because users can't denied the fact that criminals always look for ways to extract their information. Criminals always try to access all the things that could assist them in knowing other's private lives. They hack webmail accounts, steal credit card number and target users through cyber-stalking, said Webroot.

The company's survey has revealed that the number of Facebook users jumped 229% to more than 400 Million over the previous year. In fact, Facebook overtook Google in the US to become the most visited website in the week ended on March 13, 2010. In the beginning of March 2010, Twitter registered an increase of 1500% in the number of new users over a year period. Hence, social networking websites are putting people at risk.

Jeff Horne, Director of Threat Research, Webroot, said that the clash between the number of people joining social networking websites and increasingly sophisticated malware attacks by cyber criminals to harvest whatever personal information they share with each had been turning into a storm, as reported by prnewswire on March 30, 2010.

For instance - it has been found that more than 100 variants of Koobface exist on the Internet. These variants deceive people into clicking on links on which they shouldn't have clicked to corrupt their computers and convince them that they should provide credit card numbers to purchase bogus antivirus products and other fraudulent activities.

Webroot survey concludes with the revelation of an increase in spam on social networks, which often contain links to malevolent websites. The survey showed a rise of 23% in spam on social networking websites since last year.

Related article: Hacker & Virus in MySpace

» SPAMfighter News - 4/8/2010