AVG campaign tackles Facebook 'status jacking'

Gordon Peters
Thursday, 16 September 2010 23:37

IT Industry - Market

AVG has launched a new online campaign which it says is designed to help university students battle Facebook 'status jacking', which occurs when login information is stolen and a friend or criminal takes over a Facebook account, often posting fake and sometimes malicious status messages.

The campaign has been launched on the back of new research from AVG's 'Threat Labs', which provides an instant and complete safety analysis of websites including detection statistics, a detection timeline, an analysis of linked sites and a detection map.

In an analysis 50 global social networks, AVG says it found that :

'¢    Of 50 top social networks worldwide, there are 19,491 compromised web pages

'¢    Of these 11,701 are on Facebook - the world's largest social network

'¢    YouTube had 7,163 compromised web pages

According to AVG Australia and New Zealand managing director, Peter Cameron, the fact that the company found almost 20,000 compromised web pages on the world's most popular social networking sites should 'make social media users sit up and take notice.'

Cameron says that, in particular, 'it is the audience most active on these sites, those under 25 years old who are most at risk,' and he adds, 'students 18-25 years old are particularly at risk of having their status jacked on social networking sites like Facebook. This is due to the demographic being particularly active on social media. For example, in the US 72 percent of all 18-25 year olds are active on social networks.'

At the same time, Cameron says, existing research also shows that 18-25 year olds are the least likely to take Internet security concerns seriously. 'The UK's Ofcom Communications Market Report showed that only 15 percent of 16-24 year olds are concerned about Internet security, compared with 23% of the Internet using population. Meanwhile only 9 percent are concerned about privacy.'

And, according to AVG, the July 2010 VeriSign Online Fraud Barometer assessment of the Australian online fraud landscape reported those most affected by online ID fraud were 18-24 year olds, with victims suffering average losses of $1,619 in the previous twelve months and one in 10 expect never to recover their lost money.

Cameron said that the AVG campaign will involve 'further research showing that only a few students take proper social network precautions, as well as a series of informative but also fun, guides and videos.'