Article Blog #9

Article: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/19/social.networking.crimes/index.html?iref=newssearch

Support: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/P/phishing.html

Facebook, Twitter, and many of your favorite networking websites that you love looking at day in and day out could prove to be harmful to your personal information and your computer. This is all because,
“more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI” (cnn.com). There have been thousands of these social network accounts captured by hackers using them for fraud. Internet phishing is, “The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft” (webopedia.com). This has been a powerful way for people to get a lot of your personal information, and it is being used a lot to lure social networkers into giving away private information on a fake website. These social networking sites have seen massive growth, which only means that there are tons of cybercriminals trying to attack. The article also talks about how many sites encourage their members to change their passwords constantly to avoid the chance of being attacked. During this decade, the most common form of malware attack has been through audio downloads, and while surfing around sites like Google or Yahoo. Social networking sites have tried to answer these complaints from their members by making their systems more secure, while having a complex automated system to avoid the ease for hackers to hijack your accounts.

I think that this issue is very difficult to solve, and I am unsure of how long it will actually take to handle this situation. Hackers are very intelligent, and trying to stop them is a task that is extremely hard due to their ability to stay two steps ahead all the time. The chance of viruses ever going away is not likely in the near future in my opinion. The only way I think that we can stop these hackers is to bulk up the internet security while having more people looking for suspicious behaviors within these popular websites. Many phishing frauds use fake website addresses to try and trick users into believing that something about them is being said on another website and gives the use a link to “check it out”. A lot of these hackers get paid for how many people they can get to click the links. The these phishing tactics are very clever in the way they lure people in, but it is up to the individual to be careful and double check that what they are actually clicking will lead them to where they want to go. It will be hard to stop these frauds and viruses, and it will only get worse before it gets any better, but I think that over time we will be able to do it.