Only a small number of respondents to a recent Kaspersky Lab/B2B International survey understand the risks associated with active use of social networks. At greatest risk are those who use mobile devices to access social networking sites.
The survey shows that communication via social networks is one of the most popular activities on the Internet. Overall, social networking was the third most popular activity after checking email and reading, and was even more popular on mobile devices – ranking second.
At the same time, in South Africa, 75% of the survey respondents do not think they are of any interest to hackers or do not even think about this issue. 13% of respondents discuss private information with strangers, while another 20% of those surveyed use social networks to share information they would never disclose in real life. Furthermore, 18% of respondents enter their data to online accounts while connected to public WiFi.
Only 19% think they reveal more personal information than they should on social networks, and only 4% of respondents include their social network credentials in the list of three types of information they are most afraid of losing.
Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, comments: “Our latest social media study shows that of the total 11,8-million Facebook users in South Africa, 2-million are new users on Facebook in the past year and of the 6,6-million Twitter users in South Africa, 1,1-million are newcomers to Twitter. In most cases, these new users – as well as many of the existing users – have no idea what threats await careless users of social networks.”
Careless user behaviour can lead to unpleasant consequences. Attackers often look through social networks searching for information inadvertently left by the user. This information may help them in committing a crime: email addresses can be used for fraudulent schemes; some information may help them break a password or identify a user location and much more.
In turn, access to a user account can give cybercriminals even more opportunities, including sending malicious links and files to the target’s “friends”, stealing personal data that will later be sold on the black market and so on.
Statistics show that hacker interest in social networks is not dying out. According to Kaspersky Security Network data, in 2013 Kaspersky Lab products blocked more than 600-million attempts to visit a phishing (fake) page and over 35% of these sites imitated social networking sites.
The survey also shows that 50% of users in South Africa faced suspicious messages asking them to follow an unknown link or download a potentially malicious file, and 25% of users received emails sent allegedly by a social network in an attempt to obtain their credentials.