misuse.
These include Facebook and especially Twitter, which has particularly shot to limelight after proving to be a popular medium among politicos and Bollywood actors.
Missing plugin "Cyber criminals have gotten increasingly smarter over the past few years. What will happen on a fake celebrity page is that the fraudster will place a link to a video and then will ask you to download a missing plugin to play the video.
Worm-Iculture: MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster and several other social networking sites have been hit by a worm Koobface that is designed to steal information like credit card numbers."What you're actually downloading then is a piece of malicious software that can lead to the theft of your credit card details, your name, date of birth, family details, home address and telephone numbers," said Gaurav Kanwal, country sales manager, consumer products and solutions, Symantec, which provides online security solutions.
Survey
As per the company's 2009 survey findings, 67 per cent of users interviewed in India were least likely to install a security software.
Officials at Kaspersky, who also sell Internet security software, agreed.
"The larger the audience of the site the better it serves criminals' purpose," said Sergey Golovanov, senior malware analyst, non-Intel research group manager, Kaspersky Lab Asia.
MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster and several others have been particularly hit hard this year by a worm called Koobface that is designed to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers.
Fake Yash Tonk Too
And it's not only A-listers who are affected.
TV star Yash Tonk, who is currently away in Thailand on the shoot of his upcoming film Kisses Love Phillum Dosti, also was shocked to learn from friends that a fake Facebook site on his name was making the rounds.
"Several of my friends have even joined the friends list thinking it was me. There's certainly some mischief going on and I hope it's been only a harmless prank so far. As soon as I get back, I'm going to address the problem."
Online Fakes
There are several fake accounts of Katrina Kaif, Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai, Shahid Kapur, Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat, Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Hrithik Roshan, Aamir Khan, John Abraham and Lara Dutta on networking sites.
For every real account of a star out there, there are 10 fake ones, but I largely considered them as harmless.
