Twitter gets attacked- how safe is social networking?

Online, February 3, 2010 (Newswire.com) - It looks like social networks are coming under attack more and more frequently from phishing attacks, as well as other security breach issues. This time, its Twitter.

From the post on CNet:
"As part of Twitter's ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite," the company said in a statement.

Some Twitter users apparently "used their Twitter username and password to sign up for an untrusted third-party application which then posted Tweets to their account," a spokeswoman said.

This came in the wake of a number of users reporting that emails from Twitter asking to change their passwords kept coming in to their inboxes. Many people received numerous emails from Twitter (the emails were traced back to an original Twitter server) about this issue. As a safety precaution, Twitter is asking people to change their passwords anyway.

And then, if this isnt bad enough, Sophos, the IT security firm, released their Security Threat Report that states Facebook and Twitter has been seeing a rising number of attacks by cybercriminals. In the report released by Sophos, 57% of users reported they have been spammed and 36% have received malware through a social networking site. Roughly, that's a 70% increase in malware and spam reports. Other sites referenced in the report include MySpace and LinkedIn.

With more and more people using social networking for personal and business uses, how secure is secure? There is the usual security precautions about not writing down passwords, backing up personal and business data, encrypting sensitive data, changing passwords on a regular basis, using difficult passwords to make them harder to crack, not opening email attachments unless its from someone you know, and checking emails to make sure they came from the correct source. But, how many people truly follow these suggestions? Its all about the end user, not the website. The sites can only do so much.

Teens and college students make up a large chunk of the social networking audience. How often have they been warned about Internet and web site security? There should be some sort of class on Internet security taught in schools, but how realistic is that going to be?

On the other hand, cybercriminals tend to go after the larger companies or sites with the largest audiences. They are easy targets. So, what is there to worry about? The sad thing is that if its not social networking, it will be something else..whatever that next "it" thing.

So, how safe is social networking? As safe as it can be in the year 2010. Are we being overly paranoid or just cautious? Time will tell.