Bangalore (Indo-Asian News Service )
If you belong to the generation of net savvy Indians, beware of browsing social networking sites for long as your PC or laptop could easily fall prey to cyber attacks from hackers.
As per the 2007 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) compiled by anti-virus and security solutions major Symantec, social networking sites are the latest target of hackers to attack home and enterprise computers.
"With the web emerging as the seamless medium of communication, information and interaction, online users are prone to get infected by engaging in social networking and browsing frequented websites due to malicious online activity in the form of worms, bots, viruses and Trojans," Symantec India Managing Director Vishal Dhupar told IANS.
Some of the popular social networking sites on the worldwide web are Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Orkut.
About six million Indians are actively involved in social networking and spend nearly an hour of their online accessing websites providing such networking activity.
"The use of social networking websites in phishing attacks is symptomatic of the trend towards targeting people rather than their computers or laptops because users are the weakest link in internet security. As a result, personal information, confidential data or corporate dossiers stored insecurely face the risk of being corrupted or stolen," Dhupar noted.
Phishing is an e-mail fraud method by which a hacker sends out legitimate-looking e-mail in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well-known and trustworthy websites.
The report found that 65 per cent of malicious attacks in India were through computer worms as against 22 per cent globally due to lack of a fool-proof security patch or failure to install updates of anti-virus software in time.
High proliferation of viruses in India due to malicious code propagation vectors such as file sharing or executables has made net-surfers or browsers vulnerable to cyber attacks.
According to the report, there were 345 phishing URL (universal resource locator) links with IP (Internet Protocol) addresses hosted in India.
Even reputable Indian banks were not spared, as about 400 phishing attacks were detected in the second half of last year.
Among Indian cities, Mumbai had the majority of bot-infected computers (56 per cent), followed by Chennai (16 per cent) and Delhi (14 per cent).
The report also found attackers leveraging a maturing underground economy to buy, sell and trade stolen information.