Social Media and Blog Protection and Beyond

The surging popularity of social media may have ranked the Philippines as the no. 1 social networking market in Asia, but it has also put us no. 1 in terms of risk when it comes to cyber crimes and cyber threats which lurk these social networking sites.

“Social networking easily enables its users to connect to their peers and colleagues through adding friends or joining groups, which enable them to build a network conveniently. However, the same characteristic of such social media sites is also its weakness, as it makes the user extra vulnerable to viruses, threats and cyber crimes which, in contrast, cause a great deal of inconvenience,” Myla Pilao, Core Technology Director of Trend Micro said.

According to Trend Micro, the basic classifications of cyber crimes that occur in social networking sites include: like jacking attacks that make users “like” sites or pages without direct consent, rogue app attacks which try to get users to authorize fake apps to get access to your account, spam campaigns that let users post and send out unwanted messages to your friends; and malicious links which lead users to malicious or hacked sites. 

Also notable is the growing wave of scam which is becoming a hit for cybercriminals—luring the public into pinning fake posts that lead to survey scams.

According to Pilao, “on a typical weekday, Trend Micro collects around 7.6 billion URLs that lead to bad sites and 1.5 billion files that are harmful, identifies over 170 million spammed messages, 17,000 malicious URLs and 4.3 million malicious files. These numbers indicate that social media has really become a high risk environment for its users.”

“Trend Micro believes that web reputation, email reputation and file reputation are interconnected.  Given that we use social networking sites on a daily basis, it is important that we become proactive users. This will not only protect us from such threats, but those people in the network as well.  With Trend Micro’s sophisticated security system such as Titanium and Smart Protection Network viruses and malicious threats are disabled. Always remember to use social media with caution. Protect yourself and kill the risk. Be a smart social media user,” Pilao added. 

ABOUT TREND MICRO

For more than 20 years, Trend Micro has been delivering timely threat intelligence, service and support to our global customer base and defends tens of millions customers round-the-clock through TrendLabs. As new threats and vulnerabilities emerge, Trend Micro remains committed to timely threat intelligence and ongoing innovation to help customers secure data, ensure compliance, reduce costs, and safeguard business integrity. For more information, go to www.trendmicro.com.