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Social Networks to be Greatest Attack Targets During 2011, Forecasts McAfee

McAfee Avert Labs, on December 28, 2010, brought out its 2011 Threat Predictions Report, according to which, cyber-criminals' most tempting target during the year will be social-networking websites.

States McAfee the security company, link condensers like http://natpo.st/h5FQP6 that will be used more and more to include tinier links within Twitter posts of 140 characters will be especially dangerous since end-users won't be aware of the landing site.

Meanwhile, towards the end of 2010, a few extremely low scales of worldwide spam, since several years, were observed because users increasingly moved from more gradual high-profile communications viz. electronic mail towards more instant means like Twitter and Instant Messaging. This transition is likely to wholly change the threat scenario during 2011, the report forecasts. Business.financialpost.com published this on December 28, 2010.

Indeed the changed threat scenario is likely to have e-mail ultimately getting replaced with social networking contacts as the chosen zone for disseminating malevolent web-links and viscous codes. States McAfee, personal information in enormous volumes across the social-networking websites together with users' unawareness about the way for appropriately protecting this kind of information will result in far more easier methods, unlike ever before, for committing identity theft crimes.

Additionally, the security company observes that during 2010, a rise was witnessed in certain threats' sophistication like signed malicious code which successfully copied lawful files. During 2011, this trend, according to McAfee, will become more intensive and simultaneously there'll be more of stolen tools, techniques and keys for creating counterfeit keys.

Furthermore, during 2011, there'll be an increasing use of botnets to delete files from attacked computers instead of pushing spam. What's more, such networks will exploit social media for collecting data in more advanced forms.

Aside this, McAfee predicts that hacktivism will rise. The recent case of WikiLeaks suggests that activists will increasingly utilize its crowd-sourcing for hiring hackers towards accomplishing political agendas.

Remarking about this possible e-threat scenario, Threat Research Vice-President Dmitri Alperovitch at McAfee Labs stated that the attacks weren't refined, so enterprises should succeed in safeguarding themselves from them via adopting suitable actions. Govinfosecurity.com published this on December 28, 2010.

Related article: SoCal Computer Hack Traces to Watsonville

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