Social networking is all around us. More than a billion people are on Facebook and the number of Twitter users is also growing. While it is fantastic that the world can connect, the reality is that it also means that the world can connect with malicious people. There are many ways in which social media can be dangerous for your personal life and for your computer and this is why you must install antivirus software that is able to cope with the specific threats caused by social media. But just what are these threats?
Rogue Applications
If you ever see a post on social media with a question such as ‘could this be too good to be true’, you can almost guarantee that you have spotted a rogue application. A well-known example of this is Profile Spy, which promised people could see who had visited their Facebook profile. Completely untrue and all this did was collect personal data from every user that clicked on the link.
Clickjacking
Clickjacking is very frightening. The internet is designed to present you with visual things in the hopes that you will click on them. Whether that is an image of a cute kitten or a link to an SEO company doesn’t matter. You will see a visual cue for something and you will go to it. Clickjacking happens when these visual cues actually point to something else. So, you may think you just clicked on a cute puppy trying to eat a flower, you have actually given an unknown person access to your webcam, meaning they can see you and what you do. Yes this is real, and it is very frightening. A well-known example is ‘Cheerleaders Gone Wild’, which allowed people to see a cheerleading squad working out, but at the same time sent two separate applications to all of the user’s friends.
Phishing
Phishing is nothing new and it has been a popular email tactic for a long time. It lost much of its popularity until social media came about, at which point cyber criminals decided to revive it, because they had access to so many different people in one go. Basically, to avoid phishing, you need to not accept any friend request or follow request from anyone where you are not 100% sure if you know them or not. You may feel rude for not accepting such a request, but the chance that it is phishing is simply too big.
BitDefender once ran an experiment. They sent a friend request from a beautiful young blond woman wearing a red dress to around 2,000 male users. This woman was completely made up. 94% of the men accepted the request. After half an hour of conversation with the made up person, 10% revealed information that could be used to recover a password. After just two hours, 73% could be convinced to send private information from their place of employment. And the most shocking element of all is that 31% of the 2,000 young men worked in IT security.