With the Philippines being ranked no. 1 in social networking market in Asia it also puts the country at risk from cyber threats and crimes. Since Philippines law on cyber crime is not that strict in terms of consistency and substance every people from the country will be needing protection from these threats.
“Social networking easily enables its users to connect to their peers and colleagues through adding friends or joining groups, which enable them to build a network conveniently. However, the same characteristic of such social media sites is also its weakness, as it makes the user extra vulnerable to viruses, threats and cyber crimes which, in contrast, cause a great deal of inconvenience,” Myla Pilao, Core Technology Director of Trend Micro said.
According to Trend Micro, the basic classifications of cyber crimes that occur in social networking sites include: like jacking attacks that make users “like” sites or pages without direct consent, rogue app attacks which try to get users to authorize fake apps to get access to your account, spam campaigns that let users post and send out unwanted messages to your friends; and malicious links which lead users to malicious or hacked sites.
With the surge of cyber crimes and scams using social networking sites in the Philippines, it is now a requirement and necessity for every computer at home and office to have maximum protection because the criminals nowadays have also gone high tech.
According to Pilao, “on a typical weekday, Trend Micro collects around 7.6 billion URLs that lead to bad sites and 1.5 billion files that are harmful, identifies over 170 million spammed messages, 17,000 malicious URLs and 4.3 million malicious files. These numbers indicate that social media has really become a high risk environment for its users.”
“Trend Micro believes that web reputation, email reputation and file reputation are interconnected. Given that we use social networking sites on a daily basis, it is important that we become proactive users. This will not only protect us from such threats, but those people in the network as well. With Trend Micro’s sophisticated security system such as Titanium and Smart Protection Network viruses and malicious threats are disabled. Always remember to use social media with caution. Protect yourself and kill the risk. Be a smart social media user,” Pilao added.
The surging popularity of social media may have ranked the Philippines as the no. 1 social networking market in Asia, but it has also put us no.reputation management