Social media platforms are a major conduit for malware and a highly effective marketplace for black hat resources, generating cybercrime worth over $3.2bn every year, according to Bromium. The security vendor’s latest report, Social Media Platforms and the Cybercrime Economy, is the result of a six-month study by Mike McGuire, senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Surrey. It follows a previous Into the Web of Profit report written by McGuire which estimated annual global cybercrime revenues at $1.5tr. The new study warned that social media is effectively a “global distribution center for malware,” with a fifth of organizations having been infected via these platforms. Reports of cybercrime involving social media grew more than 300-fold between 2015 and 2017 in the US, and social media-enabled crime quadrupled between 2013 and 2018 in the UK.
Source: Infosecurity Magazine
