Social networks such as Twitter prove to be easy targets for hackers.
In recent happenings in the social world, Twitter has been faced with several attacks including one that made the service unavailable to all its users while Facebook continues to be hit with compromised user accounts used to send malicious messages.
With the new social age online, Twitter is becoming favored by hackers as a place to conduct malicious actions for the intent of infecting computers. Security researchers have witnessed an increase in the number of attacks which was released in the recorded in the Web Hacking Incidents Database report today.
Basically, a social network such as Twitter or Facebook is a prime target for hackers considering that they are environments that enable an attacker to go untraced and can easily spread malware to hundreds if not thousands of users in a small amount of time. A social network such as Twitter can turn viral, not only through a legitimate tweet message, but through a malicious tweet that contains a malevolent link.
Twitter seems to be the bigger target as its infrastructure allows a hacker to attack the network much easier than that of Facebook. Twitter has even had attackers infiltrate the network to obtain personal documents from the administration so that by itself will tell you about Twitters ongoing security efforts.
Several worms have been the culprit of recent attacks on Twitter and Facebook such as the Koobface infection. DDoS attacks have been the cause of an outage of Twitter. Cross-site scripting attacks have allowed malicious code to get pushed to user's systems. SQL injections have also been spawned from websites that users are redirected to from malicious tweets. The list goes on.
Hackers want to make money and that is the main reason for all of the attacks happening. One, Twitter is an easy target followed by Facebook and hackers want an extra pay-day at your expense.
Computer users are urged to be cautions and mindful of their accounts on Twitter and Facebook. Never give out your password and use a strong password. If you suspect suspicious activity, then you should report it to the proper authorities and then change your password.