Sophos: Significant Rise in Social Networking Spam, Malware

A Sophos investigation shows that more than half the users of social networking have been sent spam over the site, while more than a third have received malware.

SC Magazine reports that during the past year, there has been a rise of 70.6 percent in social-networking spam and a 69.8 percent rise in malware being sent. Respondents pointed to Facebook as being the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace and Twitter.

David Harley, director of malware intelligence at ESET, expects the trend to continue:

In 2010, it's more than likely that we'll see increased targeting of social networks ... Attackers will be looking for data they can exploit from a social engineering standpoint, but they will also be looking for cross-site scripting and replicable malware attacks on the Web sites as well as their application programming interfaces.