Social networking attacks on the rise

Over the past year, the popularity of applications on social networking websites has increased dramatically, which has led to a new wave of phishing attacks targeting the users of these applications, Symantec reports.

Symantec’s Security Response Team has identified a rise in social networking attacks for mobiles, attacks on live chat and an increase in phishing websites attacking blogs over the past couple of months. Phishing websites that attacked blogging in social networking comprised 23 percent of all targeted applications, and five percent of the targeted applications were on live chat.

Symantec also observed the rise in the number of users accessing the internet through smartphones has led to an increase in hackers creating phishing websites on social networking brands claiming to provide these services on smartphones.

Symantec advises internet users to follow best practices to avoid phishing attacks by avoiding clicking on suspicious links from emails, checking the URL of the website to make sure it belongs to the brand, and typing in the domain name of the brand directly into the browser rather than following any link.