Press Releases

AVG Launches Campaign to Help University Students Battle Facebook Status Jacking

Company’s Innovative ‘Threat Labs’ Research Aims Shows High Level of Compromised Pages on Facebook

AMSTERDAM, September 15, 2010– AVG Technologies, makers of the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, today announced the start of a new online campaign designed to help university students battle Facebook status jacking this school year. Facebook status jacking occurs when login information is stolen and a friend or criminal takes over a Facebook account, often posting fake and sometimes malicious status messages. The campaign has been launched on the back of new research from AVG’s ‘Threat Labs,’ which provides an instant and complete safety analysis of Web sites including detection statistics, a detection timeline, an analysis of linked sites and a detection map.

AVG Threat Labs analyzed the safety of 50 global social networks, finding that:

• Looking at 50 top social networks worldwide, there are 19,491 compromised web pages
• Of these 11,701 are on Facebook - the world’s largest social network
• YouTube had 7,163 compromised web pages

“The fact that we found almost 20,000 compromised web pages on the world’s most popular social networking sites should make social media users sit up and take notice. In particular, it is the audience most active on these sites, those under 25 years old who are most at risk,” said Ambassador of Free Tony Anscombe. “Our campaign will involve further research showing that only a few students take proper social network precautions, as well as a series of informative but also fun, guides and videos.”

According to AVG, students 18-25 years old are particularly at risk of having their status jacked on social networking sites like Facebook. This is due to the demographic being particularly active on social media; for example in the US 72 percent of all 18-25 year olds are active on social networks (source Pew Research Center - http://bit.ly/9QWFD3)

At the same time, existing research also shows that 18-25 year olds are the least likely to take Internet security concerns seriously. The UK’s Ofcom Communications Market Report showed that only 15 percent of 16-24 year olds are concerned about Internet security, compared with 23% of the Internet using population. Meanwhile only 9 percent are concerned about privacy.

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About AVG Technologies

www.avg.com

AVG is a global security software maker protecting more than 110 million consumers and small businesses in 170 countries from the ever-growing incidence of web threats, viruses, spam, cyber-scams and hackers on the Internet. AVG has nearly two decades of experience in combating cyber crime and one of the most advanced laboratories for detecting, pre-empting and combating Web-borne threats from around the world. Its free, downloadable software allows novice users to have basic anti-virus protection and then easily upgrade to greater levels of safety and defense when they are ready. AVG has nearly 6,000 resellers, partners and distributors globally including Amazon.com, CNET, Cisco, Ingram Micro, Play.com, Wal-Mart, and Yahoo!.

Source: www.avg.com/press-releases-news

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