Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Signing up for social networking security

Social security on the web is not a state benefit, but awareness that some of those so-called friends are bad guys waiting for to exploit a weakness in your computer’s defences.

Social networking sites – often referred to as Web 2.0 applications – have exploded in popularity in recent years.

Some of the most popular, like Bebo, Facebook and MySpace have hundreds of millions of users and are signing up 250,000 or more new accounts daily – and they represent just three of more than 300 similar sites.

More and more of these sites are opening for business as well as pleasure, and as with all things in life, where people and money gather, so do fraudsters and con artists.

The bad guys have already hit Web 2.0 where it hurts:

• The German Wikipedia had information pages about the destructive Blaster worm rewritten to include a link to a fix that was in reality malware to infect Windows computers

• More than a million MySpace users had their computers exploited by spyware when they opened a page hosting an online banner advert

• Another MySpace user developed a worm that added a million friends to his buddy list overnight

Best advice for surfing social network sites is keep your friends close but the rest closed off.
This means taking simple precautions to make your social security tighter:

• DO add people you know and trust

• DO NOT click links on pages you can’t verify in case they drop malware – worms, Trojans, viruses and spyware – on your computer.

• DO install antivirus and spyware protection

• DO activate the firewall in your broadband router

• DO tell the site’s web master if you suspect a Web 2.0 page is a scam or malicious

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