South By Texas State

Dr. Paul Judge, Chief Research Officer at Barracuda Networks discussed the history and malicious activities of hackers in Twitter and Facebook. Judge began his presentation by analyzing the state of the web and indicating an association between web usage and spam attacks.

“1 in 100 urls on twitter is spam and malicious,” states Judge. Judge also indicates that there is a large number of fake accounts that follow real people. In terms of Facebook, 1 in 60 posts tend to be spam and/or malicious. Judge states that spammers tend to utilize real people’s Facebook accounts to send malicious links. He also implies that spammers use other alternative methods like rogue Facebook apps, URL shorteners, hidden truth photos, and fake Facebook profiles amongst others. In terms of email spam, Judge implies that nearly 85,000 daily emails claim to be Facebook.

“1 in 5 respondents have been affected negatively by information that was exposed on a social network” says Judge. He explains that fake accounts use popular trendy topics to draw people’s attention by persuading them to click on their links. In the end, Judge urges web users to be more cautious, unless they want to experience high percentages of spam in social media platforms.

“Unless we do something about it, we will just become accustomed to 80-90% spam on social networks, just as we have with email,” indicates Judge.

Here’s an interview Shawn did with Paul Judge about social network security: