Ethical hacker Ankit Fadia, who was in the city on Friday, spoke about the vulnerability of Facebook, Orkut and Twitter users to fall prey to viruses on the social networking sites, and the urgent need for enhanced security for government websites.

The young tech-wizard warned that wall-posts on your Facebook account such as ‘Microsoft is paying you for forwarding this e-mail’, ‘Check out this video’ and forwards from a well-known friend’s ID with ‘lol’ in the subject were actually viruses.

Fadia said the most vulnerable were those with only basic know-how in operating the sites. “Financial fraud is becoming an everyday matter now, especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities where the user in business circles is an average middleaged Indian who doesn’t know much about networking beyond the basics.

As for the inability of anti-virus software in dealing with these viruses, Fadia told Express, “Anti-virus software block pop-ups but not Facebook messages.” Speaking about the easy threat from hackers to badly maintained government websites, Fadia revealed that ministry websites, particularly related to telecom, and websites of passport offices and the like got defaced often but little was being done to secure it. Hackers get into government controlled websites innumerable times but no concrete step has been taken to prevent that so far.

“Tomorrow the miscreants don’t need an AK-47 to fight their battles as they can bring economies crashing down through the internet as had happened in Estonia in 2007,” Fadia said, highlighting how China was strengthening and investing in cyber security experts.

“In fact, six months ago there was news in American newspapers about how a lot of US governmental websites like the electricity distribution system, NASA, CIA, etc were hacked into by Chinese criminals who smartly made it look like the sabotage was done from North Korea,” Fadia revealed.