Social networks fail on security

Social networks are failing to deploy adequate security for their applications, which are often fraught with threat vulnerabilities.

Security vendor Blue Coat Systems warns in its latest Web security report that 25% of all Web access activity originates from social networks. “Web 2.0 services will become increasingly vulnerable to attack.”

Consumer pressure is building to develop new applications and services, which bring with them new vulnerabilities, says the company.

In addition, the number of users on social networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 302 million last year from 2008 numbers, bypassing the e-mail user population by 10%. The massive audience on social networking sites such as Facebook and micro blogging site Twitter have spurred cyber criminals to use them as a hook to spread malware.

This means more people use social networks than e-mail as a primary form of electronic communication, indicates Blue Coat. Last year, Twitter officially dethroned e-mail as the dominant method of electronic communication, according to the security vendor.

Cyber criminals have caught on to this trend, and as a consequence, are driving phishing and malware attacks as part of a complex blended threat to target social networking tools, the security company says.

2009 saw numerous reports of social networking services being phished, spammed or compromised. Koobface was the most notorious of the malware attacks and first appeared in December 2008. Around three million computers have since been infected with Koobface, says Blue Coat.

According to the company, the global app market, which is largely unregulated by social networks, is fertile ground for criminal activity. Cyber criminals are no longer focused on simply defacing corporate Web sites. Instead, today's attacks are subtle, highly professional and profit-driven, targeting multiple security vulnerabilities and exploiting them for maximum financial gain.

In 2009, blended threats, which combine viruses and Trojans with other programs, evolved into complex malicious structures, which have adapted to the current environment of technology, users and vulnerabilities, says the security vendor.

These blended threats have been responsible for the majority of successful attacks in recent years, and can spread through the network, e-mail and removable media (including USB drives), according to the Blue Coat report.

The security company explains that blended threats grew faster in 2009 than in any previous year. In one type of attack, dozens or even hundreds of Web sites are created, some to serve as phishing sites, some to deliver multiple and different forms of malware, some appearing as fake search results, and others simply as bait pages.

According to Cisco's 2009 annual security report, the exploit and attack threat levels in social networks increased by 57% in the past year. New attacks rely on social media users' willingness to respond to messages that supposedly originate from people they know and trust.

Cisco found Facebook has been used to drive 419 scams whereby user credentials are stolen by keylogger malware or the user is fooled into handing over personal information to the scammer.

Cisco security researcher Henry Stern says the security problem is compounded by large social media audiences. Stern states: “People with significant Twitter audiences who mistakenly publish a link to malware will cause far more problems than someone who only tweets to a few friends.

“The addition of third-party content such as news feeds removes even further control from the account holder in terms of vetting potentially dangerous links.”

According to Cisco, the dark Web is a section of the Web that contains billions of Web pages containing social networking sites and blogs that are not categorised by traditional URL filtering databases. Cisco Security Intelligence Operations estimates that more than 80% of the Web can be classified as 'dark'.

This means the majority of malware threats lurk in the dark Web, where 32 new domains are added every year and are vulnerable to malicious attacks.