UKFast security bulletin - January 2010

feature article

Twitter and Facebook are cyber criminal's top 2010 targets

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Social networking sites will be the main focus for cyber crime in 2010, according to Security experts McAfee Labs.

Leading the way is Facebook with more than 350 million users and malware authors are expected to develop their attacks to take full advantage of the social networking buzz that will continue this year.

By hijacking existing members' accounts on Facebook and Twitter, criminals will seek to abuse the relationship of trust between sites and their users and encourage unsuspecting friends to click on links that they might otherwise ignore.

Following Apple's App Store reaching the 100,000 mark, rogue applications, which capture sensitive credentials and data, are also expected to abuse the facility to post on trusted mainstream websites.

Early indications of the potential threat have arrived in the form of an alleged attack on the Huffington Post Twitter account, where offensive messages suggested the account had been hacked. Although juvenile posts rather than spam or malicious links were the only result before the account was suspended the attack did alert avid Tweeters to the increased risk.

While HTML5 and Adobe software, in particular Acrobat Reader and Flash, are also marked as potential targets, McAfee does report that cyber security is also expected to develop in 2010 to combat the increased threat.

other news

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New OS sure to be 'poked' by hackers Google Inc.'s Chrome OS will be "poked" by hackers in 2010, in large part because it will be the "new kid on the block," a security researcher predicted today. Read the rest of this article.		'Sophisticated' attacks on Adobe Reader Crooks are once again exploiting the zero day hole in Adobe Reader and Acrobat to install a remote control Trojan on victims' machines. Read the rest of this article .

Best regards,

The UKFast team