More than half of the people who are on social networks or instant messaging will click on a link that a person shares. That’s a large number and it’s why there are so many people who get scammed and or get viruses.
Facebook and Twitter the two most popular social networks are also a hackers playground. These two networks are primary targets for attacks. Because of this, social networks have become one of the most significant vectors for data loss and identity theft.
Be careful about clicking on links that a friend sends via a chat application or on a social network, because your friend, in most cases, doesn’t know if something they’re sending is safe.
There’s an automated tool that poses convincingly as a real human in Internet Relay Chats (IRC) and instant messaging sessions. It lets an attacker glean personal and other valuable information from victims via these chats, or lure them into clicking on malicious links. And the researchers had plenty of success in their tests: They were able to get users to click onto malicious links sent via their chat messages 76 percent of the time. Source: Dark Reading.
You should also be careful clicking on shorten URLS.
Scams are present where there is opportunities for scammers. And Facebook as well as Twitter are the best places for them, I agree.
Even I have encountered in the instant messengers that automated links are send to the other persons which I have never did that. Most of these links are adult and health related sites.
Good thing I don’t really use facebook chat.
Nice post and your site is very cool, I like it very much.
Thank you.
There was a case a month or two ago where my aunt found out that someone (or something) had been posting links on her friends walls by using her account. She managed to get the problem resolved and warned her friends against clicking the links, but it’s scary to think that something like that could happen. It’s even more common on some instant messaging systems like MSN. Someone will try to send you a message with a link (usually their status is offline). Thanks for sharing how these scams work.
Ray,
Thank you for the comment!
I find it interesting how the internet has evolved. Social media has made it way easier for scammers and malware to operate.