Hopefully, the holiday season has found you spending a good amount of time offline: enjoying moments spent with friends and family, keeping long-standing traditions or creating new ones to follow for seasons to come, or just relaxing due to some downtime from work or school.

It wouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though, if you’ve still found yourself spending a fair share of your time during the holidays online: checking status updates and posting new pictures on Facebook, or sending and checking tweets on Twitter. And, why not?  These networking sites are an easy way to connect and share with the people we care about.

But, there is a downside: popular networking sites continually take heat for privacy concerns, and are also crawling with criminal behavior. CNET News, in a recent article it ran on security issues on Facebook and Twitter, cites two industry reports that illustrate this:

• Per a recent Sophos study, Facebook users are quick to reveal sensitive private information to people they don’t know, with 40% of Facebook users ‘blindly accepting’ friend requests from strangers  and allowing access to personal information, like their date of birth, physical address, e-mail address, and phone number.

• According to Kaspersky, of the nearly 500,000 new URLs that are tweeted daily on Twitter, between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks.

The CNET News article, “Using Facebook and Twitter Safely”, goes on to give a thorough roundup of some of the most common security and privacy issues users are faced with. It not only takes you through what the specific threats are, but more importantly, it explains what you can do about them. Take a look at the full article to learn more about solutions you can put to use today to stay safe.

And, from all of us here at Lavasoft, we hope that you’re enjoying the holidays, and that you're staying safe and secure - both online and offline!