Identity thieves are moving beyond traditional phishing attacks and using popular social networking and video-sharing sites to infect our computers with spyware.
Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report, which covers the last half of 2007, is scarier than any summer movie.
While malware used to be aimed at affecting a user's computer, the report says, now it's aimed at stealthily collecting the user's information.
Marc Fossi, one of the computer security firm's researchers for the report, spins this scenario: ID thieves compromise your friend's account and infect his Web page with malicious code dressed up as something you might want to download -- a picture or a link. When you click on it, your computer is infected with a tiny piece of malicious code called a Trojan.
"That very first Trojan is pretty dumb in itself," Fossi said. Its job is to sit undetected and then surreptitiously download instructions from a website the hacker controls.
Its first assignment may be to collect your account user names and passwords. Once it has collected and transmitted that information to its programmer, Fossi said, it may get new instructions for a series of other spy and hacking jobs on your accounts. Hackers may use your user name and passwords to plant malicious codes on your Web pages and sell the rest of your information on the black market.
Hackers have been so successful at getting our information, the report says, that black market prices have dropped.
Your Gold Card's worth about 80 cents -- down from a dollar in the first half of the year.