Social Network Sites Poised with Malwares

The third quarter threat report of AVG (Q3-2011) reveals its investigation results of socially engineered malware through social network sites, reports techwatch.co.uk on October 13, 2011.

The report envisages Facebook to be the second largest used social networking website in the world, with an estimated 750 Million users on a daily basis.

Thus, this social networking site grabs prime attention of online crooks with a golden opportunity of targeting 11% of the world's populating and 36% of the global Internet users on the whole.

However, AVG carried an investigation for analyzing threat from Facebook, in the early part of the year. In the current Q3 report, it is investigating the ways in which this threat has evolved and the additional risks associated with this social site.

"Clickjacking" and "Survey Scams", have come up to be the most widespread threat at the moment with the former still being the most popular among the Facebook attack, accounting for 80% of the attack.

Users are attracted instantly to use Clickjacking for playing a video and view the hidden content. A transparent GIF image is placed over the clip by the cyber crooks, so that when a user clicks a play, a malicious code gets executed automatically.

AVG claimed that by August 2011 itself, 80% of the attacks related to Clickjacking could be witnessed in Facebook.

Besides the aforementioned findings, other highlights of the Q3 report shows that rogue anti-virus scanners are the most widespread and active threat prevelant on the web, accounting for more than 30% of threat activities on malicious websites. In these attacks, Fragus and Blackhole are the most well-known variants of toolkits employed by the cybercriminals.

Blackhole attacks are at any cost quite intricate and can be described in a huge length as evident from an underground research showing how a kit from Russia can cost at about $1500 (1000 EUR), per year. The kit is powered by PHP and MySQL and can easily target Windows systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in Java, Adobe products and Internet Explorer.

In a nutshell, according to Keith Alexander, Director of the US National Security Agency, cyber crime is paving a never-ending problem with an estimated cost of $1 Trillion, every year, reports theinquirer.net on October 11, 2011.

Related article: SoCal Computer Hack Traces to Watsonville

» SPAMfighter News - 10/22/2011