Beware the malware

04/11/09 posted by Liz Niland

It’s easy to see when someone in your social network gets hacked. The good old strange, unexpected status updates such as “I just made $1200 by working from home today! Wow! Click here and do it too!” from someone you know is quite happy with their city office job, have always been easy to spot. Now, however, online criminals are upgrading their methods to trap punters who try their best to avoid web-imposed harm.

Given the state of some account passwords, it is perhaps not surprising that hackers are still having their wicked way with our tweets and posts. On top of this though, Twitter has been hit recently by a wave of malicious tech-heads with a new approach: creating their own accounts. Although you might not fall for following someone who is following 600 people and has posted just one tweet, clever hackers are learning how to hijack Twitter’s trending topics. As reported in the New York Times, if the hacker made a post related to one of the hottest topics for the day, their tweet would be aggregated in Twitter’s search results, gaining potentially disastrous clicks from unsuspecting users.

The best way to avoid such problems is still to use your common sense and ensure your anti-virus software and web browser are up-to-date. And although Mac computers have always been seen as a safe house from the claws of hackers, the steadily increasing number of global Mac users is making them seem more like a worthwhile target. As computer security expert, Sean Richmond, told SMH, "The threat for Macintosh is still nowhere near that of Windows, but Macs now make up about 10 per cent of the computer marketplace, double the share of a couple of years ago, making them a more attractive target for the malware makers." Be alert, but not alarmed.