The rising problem of Status Jacking

David Heath
Thursday, 16 September 2010 13:44

Your IT - Home IT

Too many people are finding, to their cost, that the things they said on social network sites come back to haunt them later in life.  It's bad enough when such things are self-inflicted, but there is a growing tide of Status Jacking, whereby login credentials are stolen or hacked and fake or malicious messages are posted.

Research on the problem is sketchy, but recent work by AVG's Threat Labs located 19,491 compromised web pages during a sweep of 50 major social networks (they don't specify what 'compromised' meant).  Of those, 11,701 were on Facebook and 7,163 were on YouTube.

"The fact that AVG 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. In particular, it is the audience most active on these sites, those under 25 years old who are most at risk," said Peter Cameron, Managing Director of AVG (AU/NZ).

The July 2010 VeriSign Online Fraud Barometer looked at the Australian online fraud landscape and noticed those most affected by online ID fraud were 18-24 year olds with victims suffered average losses of $1,619 in the previous twelve months and one in ten expect never to recover their lost money.

Similarly, research in the US by the Pew Research Centre found that 72% of all 18-25 year olds were active on social networks.  Conversely this same group is probably the least likely to take security and privacy concerns seriously.

The most recent Ofcom Communications Market Report in the UK found that just 15% of 16 - 24 year olds were concerned about Internet security and even fewer (just 9%) were concerned about Internet privacy.

In launching an online campaign to raise the awareness of these issues, AVG's Cameron noted, "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."

Sometimes the best wake-up young people can get in this area is to have a friend's Facebook page compromised by a hacker; which is a useful lesson for most in the group, but clearly a painful experience for the person directly affected.  Perhaps the AVG campaign can teach the lesson with no-one feeling the full pain.