USER COMMENTS ARE CORRUPTED

By M.S.Welles

Websense, a company providing Web, data and email security, recently issued a security threat trends report that showed 47% of the top 100 Web sites are used for significant dissemination of malware and conducting fraud.

Prominent among these are social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. The reason that social networking sites are "ripe" for exploitation is that there's an implicit sense of trust on social media sites.

Individuals wishing to spread malware and conduct fraud are deliberately focusing on the social media sites. Websense reports that 95% of all user-generated comments on chat rooms, blogs and message boards online are either malicious or spam.

This figure is amazing, even for a security report. Worse still is the fact that the malware could hijack a user's machine and send messages (generally corrupted or illegal) under the user's ID without their knowledge and consent.