Social networking has traveled a long way to reach the present stage but nobody could have ever thought that it will come along with a clever & unfriendly tag of social engineering.
Myspace, orkut & facebook are the sites who initially brought up the idea of social networking into limelight,which later on grew & is still, growing continuously with the increasing participation of more & more new agencies who are trying to build their web presence through this solid & revolutionary media of global communication.
But the pity is that such sites are becoming regular victims of Black-hat coders & hackers who unfortunately, are sometimes more clever than the big brains working behind internet security agencies.
Since 2006, the internet industry has seen a rapid increase in the number of viruses & their efficiency levels. More hacking attempts involving Trojans,worms,viruses have been made & some of them literally spoiled the face of social networks by playing with information security & user’s confidentiality.
Computer security experts like Kaspersky, Norton are constantly warning of rampant virus attacks that is hitting Facebook and MySpace. Orkut is the new entrant in the list of victims of hacking. Generally the drive towards these attacks is getting financial gain & tons of user database like emails,userids & passwords which can be exploited to fit a hacker’s needs.
According to a recent study, Google’s Orkut social networking site has seen a steep rise in the number of virus attacks due to cross-side scripting (XSS) & after it enabled flash & HTML to be embedded in the users’s scrapbooks.
Some javascripts too run popular among some naive orkut enthusiasts,which pretend to be the ultimate user friendly stuff.The hackers provoke the users to run the script(which is generally a cross-side script) in their address bar & once it is executed,the virus linked with the script penetrates automatically into the client’s hard drive,makes its copies & spreads automatically in the scrapbook of other victims present in their friendlist & the same procedure keeps repeating.
Cases of similar kind & even more harsh (like phishing attempts) were also reported in other social networking websites like facebook & myspace.
The social networking giant myspace had to loose a big chunk of its users because of a small piece of javacsript which had infected more than 1 million MySpace users in the year 2005. The script was later named as Samy Worm. This impacted loss of users. Who could not believe if Myspace ever get rid of that worm! What could be a bigger setback than this for myspace??!!
Security is the most important requirement on these sites, people behind these websites are on their toes to keep everything right and fix all their vulnerabilities. Someone Somewhere finds and exploits their system, this is going to be ongoing task for them.
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