Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites are sweeping the world with tweets, friends and more messaging than ever before, but what’s the cost of all this networking? More than two-thirds of social community members don’t proactively protect themselves from cyber attacks, a survey by the CMO Council and security software maker AVG found.
The study surveyed 250 social networking site users during the second quarter of this year and found that a whopping 64 percent never or rarely change their passwords. All networking sites offer privacy controls to some extent, but 57 percent don’t regularly adjust these settings, therefore providing little to no real protection.
How often do you receive “friend invites” or links within messages from people you don’t know? According to this study, 21 percent of users have accepted such invitations and 64 percent have clicked on links sent by people they didn’t know. Sharing files online is another unsafe practice—yet 26 percent of respondents share their files within social networks. To complicate things further, more than half allowed friends or roommates to use their computer for social networking.
So what’s the result of this online vulnerability? Fifty-five percent of survey participants had been victims of phishing attacks, 47 percent attacked by malware and nearly 20 percent suffered identity theft, a particularly troubling and growing phenomenon online.
The executive director of the CMO Council Donovan Neale-May stated that “As social networking populations grow globally and the proliferation of niche social networks and mobile offerings extends the reach of social communities, the threats and vulnerabilities are escalating accordingly.” He goes on to say that the escalating security threats and breaches on several popular sites recently prove the need for stronger preventative measures and a higher threat awareness among social networking site users.
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There is information and rumours about the end of humanity everywhere, though it has cropped up a lot more on the web in the last few years. The most popular and specific date of this will be on December 21, 2012. The end date of the ancient Mayan calendar is December 21, 2012.Also, the ancient philoshopher Nostradamus predicted disaster around this date as did many cultures also participated in this belief.
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