Incredible growth of Social Networks in 2009 has irreversibly changed the Internet landscape. Social networks, micro-blogging and sharing services have opened new communication horizons allowing users to share any type of information, participate in common projects, play games and do many other things in real time being anywhere in the world. Such popularity and growth have created a whole new industries specializing on creating specific applications and services for social networks. Designed to improve and diversify social interaction online yet social networks represent an ideal vector for cybercriminals. The explosion of various applications on services such as facebook along with rise of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com will help hackers to take advantage of trustfulness of social networks. According to Web security firm McAfee Labs social networks will face increasingly sophisticated hacker attacks in 2010. McAfee said hackers were expected to try to take advantage of the proliferation of URL shortening services. "These services now appear in all sorts of communications -- making it easier than ever to mask the URLs that users are asked to click," it said. "This trick will play a more predominant role in 2010; it's the perfect avenue to direct users to websites that they would normally be wary about visiting.
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