The attacks by spam, phishing and malware upon social-networking sites last year were twice the amount of attacks from 2009, as mentioned in the latest review on cyber threats.

The concerned report, the Sophos' Security Threat Report 2011 got released yesterday, and it has an explanation on about the swiftly rising number of social-networking sites, the most significant of which is, not surprisingly, Facebook, that have turned into the sitting targets of the cyber attackers.

When the users of the various social-networking sites were asked by Sophos if they had got any spam or phishing e-mails or any kind of malware attack in December last year, around 67% of the people complained of having received spam. This is a rise from the previous figure of 33.4% of April 2009.

Meanwhile 43% of the people reported phishing messages, which is a rise from the 21% of the previous year. And 40% of the people complained of having malware attacks which increased from 21.2% from the 2009.

Once a hacker breaks into someone's account, there's a whole treasury of personal information from friends to relation laid before him. Then he can use that personal information by selling it to advertisers or commit various criminal acts such as identity theft.