Symantec Discover Patterns attack on Social Media

Antivirus company Symantec in its official blog released a report on the results of a study of attacks on social media. Three social media that is highlighted is Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The study was conducted from April to June 2011.

The study shows that Facebook is getting an attack with the highest percentage, namely 40 percent. Twitter thereunder YouTube with 37 percent and 23 percent of the total spam studied of the three social media.

The average life span of each attack is 10 to 20 days and one unique thing is that Symantec discovered the attacks carried out alternately. From the charts issued by Symantec shows that the attack looks like a pattern, in which when the attacks focused on specific social media, social media then the others tend to be safe.

Most spam originates from botnets. When doing an IP analysis, found 53 percent of spam originated from the United States. As many as 19 percent were from Europe. Most of the IP address has been black list in various countries. With increasing activity of the bot, a few examples of spam sent via social networking accounts created by spammers and distributed randomly.

Spam contained in social networking usually spread by e-mail notification. The message is so seductive with words that look normal like: "You have not read the following link" or "You have one unread messages" or "You have a pending friend request". In fact, the link that was sent was a link that when opened, instructs the computer automatically download the virus.

To avoid similar attacks, Facebook has made the security system that is named Facebook deployed clickjacking and self cross-site scripting (XSS) protections since May 2011. However, Twitter and YouTube do not make anti-spam security systems such as Facebook.

Large user base and growing popularity of social networking is a land tender for the attacker to continue "business" profitable. The attack could have been done to bring down competitors or destroy the relationship between companies and between countries. Accuracy of social networking users to distinguish a spam message and original message to be further improved. Diligently to update the antivirus is also one of the solutions to anticipate if the user inadvertently open a malicious link.