Twitter, Facebook 'platforms of choice' for cyber attacks: McAfee

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 19 January 2010 09:51

Business IT - Security

New and emerging cyber threats will be used by cybercriminals to target and attack social network sites this year, with McAfee predicting sites like Twitter and Facebook will be the ‘platforms of choice’ for these attacks.

In its latest report on 2010 threat predictions, McAfee says cybercriminals will target social network sites and third-party applications and, ominously warns that the crims wil use more use more complex Trojans and botnets to build and execute attacks, and take advantage of HTML 5 to create emerging threats.

However, in some good news, McAfee also predicts that it will be a good year for law enforcement’s fight against cybercrime, and observes that over recent years it has seen significant progress in the universal effort to identify, track, and combat cybercrime by governments worldwide.

The security firm says that next year marks a decade in the fight that international law enforcement agencies have undertaken against cybercrime, and it believes that this year the world will see many more successes in the pursuit of cybercriminals.

“Over the past decade, we’ve seen a tremendous improvement in the ability to successfully monitor, uncover, and stop cybercrime” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of McAfee. “We’re now facing emerging threats from the explosive growth of social networking sites, the exploitation of popular applications and more advanced techniques used by cybercriminals, but we’re confident that 2010 will be a successful year for the cybersecurity community.”

On the threat to social networks, McAfee says that Facebook, Twitter, and third-party applications on these sites are “rapidly changing the criminal toolkit, giving cybercriminals new technologies to work with and hot spots of activity that can be exploited.”

And, according to McAfee users will become “more vulnerable to attacks that blindly distribute rogue apps across their networks,” and cybercriminals will take advantage of friends trusting friends to get users to click on links they might otherwise treat cautiously.

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