4 weeks or so have passed since news about scams on Facebook broke out in cyberworld. Here is one such scam and it's quite funny that the scammers were using Facebook Pages to transmit their payload: Facebook clickjacking scam. This has exposed the latest trend in cyber attacks: the use of social networking sites as channels through which hackers can spread their payloads to unsuspecting people. Through use of social engineering, hackers can “tune” you - and I- into their nefarious schemes (fishing of pawns or what?).

One way through which hackers on social networking sites are using is through posting of links pointing to a site containing some malware. Next, they go out and get some users from the network to visit that particular application or website. And, poooof, users end up having their computers compromised; may be their computers will end up being botnets used for spamming purposes or they might lose all their data on their computers after some virus has done its stuff.

Since microblogging sites are social networks too, there can never lack some persons who are out to use them to carry out their dirty schemes. So what does this require? It requires that you should be proactive. By the way, most social networking sites do not offer any form of indemnity in situations where some people have incurred damage from hackers on their sites; their TOS pages say so.

How to take care of yourself

 Here are some few tips that you can you use to prevent attacks from hackers on microblogging sites or any other social networking site:

1. Do not trust every URL posted on the site. If you got some gut feeling that a particular URL points to some suspicious site, you can:

a. Do a Google search for that particular site. Check out reviews on other sites about that particular site.

b. Many microblogging sites use URL shortening services. Twitter’s bit.ly service may not offer one much information on the particular site to which the URL is pointing to (here is an entry on Wikipedia about criticisms of URL shortening) but Identi.ca’s url.ca service displays the entire URL whenever you hover the cursor on the truncated form.

2. Have an up-to-date antivirus installed on your computer. An antivirus program does offer protection even when you are surfing. It can nick any little phoney program that tries to load itself on to your computer.

3. Cross check the site with online databases on malicious sites such as StopBadware (http://stopbadware.org) and Google’s Malware Sites databases.