Top 10 summer security threats

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4 - News and viral videos

People like students have more time on their hands on holidays, and are more easily persuaded to click links to fake news reports and videos to stay to date with events.

It recently happened with the death of Michael Jackson. A lot of spam came through which asked users to click on videos of the pop star.

Usually when a user clicked, there was no video to be seen, but they were infected. It also recently happened with the solar eclipse event.

“This isn’t just something that happens in the summer, but is very, very popular,” Sancho said.

3 - Search results

Criminals target popular search results involving news events, ‘poisoning’ them.

These results will be positioned very high on Google results, and when a user clicks on them and they are redirected to a malicious site.

This happened recently with the Farrah Fawcett death, the Swine Flu pandemic, and the Air France plane crash of Flight 447.

2 - High-traffic websites

This is simply criminals breaking into websites and planting malicious code. This way, real websites can redirect users to bad ones so they don’t even notice.

If you were accessing a real site with an outdated browser a user can end up being automatically infected in this way.

“It is a legitimate site, so this is really, really dangerous,” said Sancho. “That is happening every day. A real infection vector.”

Sancho said that it was huge problem as users often don’t update their browsers.

1 - Social networking

The summer sees users using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to connect with their friends and family, which criminals have seen and targeted accordingly.

“If somebody gets infected and logs in to Twitter or Facebook, the trojan manages to change the status or tweets and point them to bad links,” said Sancho.

“After that person has been infected, their friends on the social networks will see the link and click on it since they trust them.”

He said that although social networks have put in security controls, they will keep being targeted as infections were very difficult to stop.

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