McAfee Predicts: Social Networking Threats to increase…

It is one thing to identify a problem, and another thing to ACT when there is a problem.  It is every persons responsibility to TAKE ACTION and use social networking responsibly !

Both businesses and customers need to take the time to understand the risks and consequences of distributing personal information WORLD-WIDE… FOREVER !   One must understand that publicly visible real-time location information, publicly documenting “stupid” behavior, and interacting with “anyone” IS (and always has been) a really bad idea.   I wonder how many potential “presidents of the USA” will be eliminated because there is an instantly findable picture of them “having fun” when they were 18 years old ?   It is time for social networking tools to be the LEADERS in “common sense” policies and protection technologies.

And then there is the criminal activity…  this is a REAL and DANGEROUS threat of both theft and personal harm.  Priority #1 for social networking tools should NOT be maximum sharing of information, priority #1 should be SAFETY.   These threats are primarily online right now, but there will definitely be more more examples of offline criminal bahavior in the next few years due to careless exposure of WAY TOO MUCH information !

What brought all of this to mind was the following whitepaper from McAfee…  (read it here)  Here is a short quote:

Social Networks Will Be Platform of Choice for Emerging Threats.Facebook, Twitter, and third-party applications on these sites are rapidly changing the criminal toolkit, giving cybercriminals new technologies to work with and hot spots of activity that can be exploited. Users will become more vulnerable to attacks that blindly distribute rogue apps across their networks, and cybercriminals will take advantage of friends trusting friends to get users to click on links they might otherwise treat cautiously. The use of abbreviated URLs on sites like Twitter make it even easier for cybercriminals to mask and direct users to malicious Web sites. McAfee Labs predicts that cybercriminals will increasingly use these tactics across the most popular social networking sites in 2010.

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