The Hindu covers the threat posed by various social network sites.
Our lives today are increasingly submerged in social-networking websites, like millions of others worldwide. In the last year, the number of Indian visitors to sites such as Facebook, Orkut, MySpace and Twitter increased by 51 per cent to 19 million (according to comScore’s 2009 report). And where people are,the phishers, scammers and spammers go.
Amit Agarwal, one of India’s top tech bloggers agrees. “The threat is very real,” he says. “You often read about these things but don’t know the people affected, but this is actually happening, everyday.”
Third-party applications on websites such as Facebook — those fun games and other time-pass applications you add on — are also frequent offenders, exposing your system to malware embedded in the application itself or in the ad on the side of its webpage. “The bad applications are usually banned after a few reports from users, but on day one of the attack, no one will know. There are 500,000 applications on Facebook, for example; it’s just impossible for them to keep track of them all,” says Amit. link.