Cyber Criminals !

Why Social Networking Sites are a favourite with Cyber criminals today!

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We all are aware of social media and social networking, but are we aware of the social scams? Have you ever thought on why these social scams are so successful? It’s not just we who love the social platforms. Cyber criminals are fond of them too. And this is no more an assumption, but a reality. Let’s look at few reasons why the social networking sites are a favourite with cyber criminals.

Looking at the scam history, some of the popular scams have been the ‘419 scam’, ‘See who viewed your profile!’, ‘Dad walks in on daughter …. Embarrassing!’, ‘Get a Starbucks gift card!’, ‘The ‘dislike’ button’, ‘Make thousands working from home!’, Twitter direct messages with bad links, ‘Twitter mentions’, LinkedIn stock scam, ‘Justin Bieber stabbed!’, ‘Your account has been cancelled.’, ‘Confirm your email account’, Pinterest Diablo 3 scam, Tumblr dating game scam, ‘Facebook will start charging members!’, and the list can go on and on.

We all might have come across these names, may be not all but definitely few of them. Repetition of attack or similarity of successive attacks clearly indicates the success cyber criminals have achieved using such scams. In an attempt to find an answer to ‘Why cyber criminals love social media?’ we found a whole bunch of reasons. Here are the few most obvious ones…

• Booming social media popularity 
• The obvious social media addiction/lure 
• Social media becoming an ideal place for crime 
• The vast transition from emails to social media 
• Rising usage of social media over smartphones

Cybercriminals use social media not only to commit crime online, but also for carrying out real world crime owing to “over-sharing” across these social platforms. A survey of 2,000 home-owners stated that 35% users post their vacation plans on social networking sites. Availability of such authentic information helps the criminals achieve their motives easily. Adding to these reasons, the money associated with the malware market is also a motivation for criminals to attack using social media.

Although social media talks more about individual users, the cyber criminals not only attack the user as an individual, but they also use it as a channel to victimise businesses. A study by Cyberoam reveals that disclosures over social media highly affect business. Here is the summary of disclosures in brief:

Just like any other medium, social media can also become a source of data leakage, intrusions, entry for malicious content, loss of productivity and so on. A good balance between security and social networking can help. How? Here are a few pointers that will help:

• Establish an organizational policy for social networking and regularly train them on the safety measures 
• Monitor access of social networks in your organization 
• Use strong passwords for your corporate profile on social networking sites 
• Upgrade IT Network Security with a solution that offers multiple security features and scans HTTPS sites (most social networking sites today are on HTTPS). 
• When signing up for social media sites, ask employees to avoid using official email address 
• Caution employees on clicking the links wisely or when installing plugins/pop-ups 
• Ask them to keep a track on the personal information they post 
• Request them to avoid allowing social networking services to scan their email address book 
• Limit the number of persons authorized to blog or tweet on behalf of the company 
• Choose an official spokesperson for Twitter/Facebook 
• Ensure that the authorized person knows what can be communicated, and when? 
• Keep a record of all public/employee disclosures

Fachmi Aditya Nugraha [ 0910960031 ]

http://www.cyberoam.com/blog/why-social-networking-sites-are-a-favourite-with-cyber-criminals-today/