As email services become better at detecting and filtering spam, spammers have begun to expand their operations to social networks, where they have a better chance of going unnoticed. That's why, according to a new study, spam has increased by 355% in the first half of 2013 on social networks.
Spam is spreading on social media so much that one in 200 posts is spam, and 5% of all apps on social media are malicious. These are some very worrying numbers revealed by Nexgate's Social Media Spam Report (PDF).
The study analyzed 60 million posts and content from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn over two years from 2011 to 2013.
The power of social spam is its reach. Spam emails are delivered to just one user, while an unsolicited message on social networks can potentially reach thousands or millions of people, and it is difficult to detect: only 15% of all social spam has a link that can be detected as spam, according to the study.
The study also reveals that Facebook and YouTube have the most spam of all other social networks. In fact, the ratio of spam on these two networks to the others is 100 to 1, and Facebook takes the prize for the network with the highest number of phishing attacks.
Source: secnews.gr
