News: Malware Spam Surges in 2009

Last year Twitter and Facebook received more attacks than ever, with a report by security company M86 security finding the amount of spam carrying malware delivered via social networking services grew dramatically during the second half of 2009.

Spam volumes increased to over 200 billion a day, 78 per cent of which automatically distributed through Botnets of infected computers. Really bad spam bearing malware was up from 600 million messages in the first half of 2009 to 3 billion in the second.

The report also found that Twitter became the ‘darling for attackers,’ with the use of shortened URLs making it easier to obscure malicious links and ‘exploit end users’ trust through social engineering.’ For example, prominent Twitterer Guy Kawasaki recently had his account hacked, which was then used to send out malicious links.

In order to protect your computer from impending Zero-Day doom, M86 suggests using the NoScript extension in Firefox in order to limit the execution of JavaScript Code.

Image by M86