Sophos Security Threat Report 2011

Sophos has published its Security Threat Report 2011, an analysis of cybercrime during 2010 and a look towards trends in 2011. Given the prevalence of social networking cybercrime attacks, this report now has a special section devoted to that topic.

In particular, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, provides caution against the rogue applications, clickjacking, and survey scams that plague social networking sites: "People need to be very careful they don’t end up being conned for their personal details, or get tricked into clicking on links that could earn money for cybercriminals or infect innocent computers."

• 59% believe employee behaviour on social networking sites could endanger corporate network security
• Half have been given unrestricted access to social networks at work
• Top malware hosting contries were the US (40%) and France (10%), displacing China from the second spot
• 30,000 new malicious URLs were created every day
• 70% of malicious URLs are legitimate websites that have been hacked

As the report indicates, both consumers and businesses may be entirely unaware that their "trusted" websites are infecting consumers every day. Malware continues to be a major problem.