Social Networks Expose You To More Risks Than Email

Computer security is a complicated issue for me as I migrate from love to hate relationships with every antivirus software I use and from the state when I think that I have nothing to worry about even if my computer stays unprotected for a few days (for total incompatibility of the antivirus of the day with something important I have to use at this particular moment) to understanding that I must have my computer infected with dozens of viruses and trojans and should do something about it immediately.

Right now I am in the second phase of this never-ending process trying out a new anti-virus solution instead of Kaspersky that refused to work correctly with one of applications that is pretty important to me and also desperately trying to figure out how it happens that I have so many viruses on my poor computer. So everything related to viruses and malware is pretty fascinating to me at this particular moment so I could not miss the press release issued by Kaspersky to inform the entire web population of their latest report proving that viruses are still dangerous and reminding us that we should protect our computers.

And while Kaspersky as a company obviously pursues their commercial benefits publishing reports like this one it is still very interesting and probably relevant not only to me. The report covers viruses and cybercriminal activities in 2008 – along with the company’s successes in fighting them. The information is based on the activity they were able to monitor in performance of their Kaspersky Security Network solution.

The main conclusion is as follows: the solution helped users protect their machines from more than 20 million attacks in 2008. Actually to me this figure does not mean a lot without the information on how many internet users currently protect their machines with this solution. So if the solution runs on 25 million computers this will be bad as it will show almost every computer is actually attacked while if it is only 5 million users it will be terrible as it will mean 4 attacks per computer. But of course Kaspersky will hardly want to distribute commercial information like this – not to mention all the people who use stolen versions of their popular solutions.

Of course Kaspersky watched not only the number of attacks but the overall behavior of cybercriminals, the tools they use to attack innocent internet users and also the places they hunt for their targets. And this is where the most interesting conclusion from the report: Kaspersky claims that social networks are now way more risky than email as frequency of infecting computers with malware in social networks is now at 10% while for email the same parameter is only 1%. So if you are a heavy user of social media sites chances are you are at constant risk of a malware or phishing attack.

Luckily, the most popular MySpace and Facebook are not on the top positions among the most dangerous social networks when it comes to chances of having your machine infected:

All in all, the experts in Kasprsky tell that 2008 was a year of huge growth of cybercriminal activity in social networks: as they have reached the mainstream popularity those people thinking about attacking us further have realized that large-scale actions targeted at users of social networks may be way more appealing than trying to attack people with the same spam messages by email no one reads any more anyway.

Among other interesting conclusions is the fact that the cybercriminals now act like a complicated market in itself with a certain specialization of labor with some people coding malware and others actually using it. At that Chinese developers produce the highest number of viruses while Russian ones tend to specialize in coding the most complicated and advanced viruses (and probably infecting our most popular social network Odnoklassniki.ru with them judging by it being the most dangerous social network in the world as visible in the table above).

Of course it is quite logical that now that cybercriminals are evolving to look more and more like a serious business, it will be more powerful and we should not expect to be exposed to less spam in the near future. What’s more, the fact that social networks are now such an appealing target for malware distribution and phishing attacks means that everyone who happens to rely on social media for our work or personal lives should now be double conscious about how we are protected as the simple rules of never opening unknown files (like we never do with emails) don’t work here any more and clicking a link apparently sent by a friend will never look suspicious enough for us not to click.

The press release and the report are currently only available in Russian, the English-language version of Kaspersky site does not feature this press release as of yet but I will update the post with a link to the report when (or if) it is available.

[Image of viruses credit]