Victim to Another Attack?
Don’t you hate it? You click on the picture or video that you were tagged in or the link that you saw on a trusted source just to find it is malware. Or maybe you went a little further and submitted your name, address, and email before you realized that you were a victim of a phishing attack.
These attacks used to be easily identified, but now they are intertwined into the applications we trust such as Facebook and Twitter (social spam). It is this false sense of security we have that leads us to click and fall prey to these attacks. The worst part about attacks from these sources is that they spread so rapidly. These attacks plague your walls, leverage your network of friends, and spread exponentially.
A recent Wall Street Journal Online article notes that less than 4% of Facebook traffic is social spam and approximately 1.5% for “spammy” tweets on Twitter. It also states that on any given day 0.5% of Facebook users can get hit with spam. While these percentages may seem low, consider that 0.5% of Facebook users add up to 4 million users. And according to The Wall Street Journal Online article, social spam is growing and traditional email spam is declining. In November, 70.5% of email was spam, down from a high of 92.5% for email spam in August 2010. To read more about social media attacks, click here to read the full article.
Just a few months ago, Websense® partnered with Facebook to provide threat protection from malicious links for all Facebook users. On average, the Websense ThreatSeeker® Network provides security intelligence to enable Facebook to present the Websense/Facebook warning page to three users every second all over the world, which is approximately 200 million malicious website blocks every day. To learn more about our partnership with Facebook, check out our press release.
« back to this month’s issue 
English (US)