"We have made it possible for people to quickly see what their friends are doing on social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn," says Ori Amiga, principal program manager partner program for Windows Live, on Microsoft's Inside Windows Live blogging site.

Microsoft notes that more people use mobile devices and smartphones to stay connected, browsing the web and web-based email. Applications need to be able to follow users across a multitude of devices and seamlessly integrate with each platform.

"Hundreds of millions of people use Messenger every day, and we heard loud and clear that they wanted to do more in their conversations. We focused on improving the personal interactions with your close friends, so that you can continue to connect in even richer ways with the people you care about most," says Piero Sierra on the Windows Blog.

"While the Windows PC is the best way to experience Messenger, we know that you spend a lot of time in web-based email, on your mobile phone, and browsing other websites. So we've built Messenger right into Hotmail, increased our support for SMS, and created Messenger apps for popular mobile phones."

To allow partners and developers to connect with Messenger across the web, Microsoft also introduced Messenger Connect. "Messenger Connect allows web, Windows and mobile app developers to create compelling social experiences on their websites and apps by providing them with social promotion and distribution via Messenger," says Amiga. Messenger Connect combines individual API’s into one single application to personalize user experiences and provide a ready-made social graph for customers to interact with. The new development platform will utilize a range of libraries, including JavaScript and .NET.

"Social media and the data-theft Trojans are the things that are really in their ascent," said Patrick Peterson, a Cisco researcher. "You can see them replacing a lot of the old-school things."

The report highlights that

• Online criminals have taken advantage of the large social media following, exploiting users' willingness to respond to messages that are supposedly from people they know and trust.
• Politically-motivated threats are increasing, while governments are teaming up and promoting online security.
• Up to 90 percent of spam is untargeted. That includes spam delivered by botnets that floods inboxes with messages from supposed banks, educational institutions, and service providers.
• More than 80 percent of the web can be classified as “uncategorized” or “unknown”, making it challenging for traditional URL filtering technology.
• The new Cisco Cybercrime Return on Investment Matrix tracks the performance of the underground online criminal marketplace, helping organizations understand the latest targets.

In the Category “Most Audacious Criminal Operation,” the Trojan Zeus is the malicious program Cisco is most concerned. Zeus delivers malware to unsuspecting users via phishing emails and drive-by downloads. The malware can “listen” to computer activity and, through this intelligence gathering, can steal login names and passwords for banking and email accounts. It can even defeat hardware tokens and onetime passwords that people assume provide protection from this type of attack, according to Cisco.

Many worms have the power to regenerate as the Koobface worm proved in 2009. It first appeared on social networking websites such as Facebook in 2008. Later, it was “reborn” on Twitter. Koobface sends “tweets” that lure Twitter users into clicking a link for a YouTube video that instructs them to update their Flash player. That’s when the “fun” begins: Users download a file and launch the worm, and Koobface is off to “wriggle” its way toward even more potential victims. Thanks to variants of this malicious software, it is estimated that nearly 3 million computers have been infected. Koobface landed on first place in the category “Most Notable Criminal Innovation.”

Cisco also raises awareness about free services such as bit.ly and ow.ly that replace the long URL with a shorter unique address. Individuals who want to share WebPages, such as news articles or blog posts, with friends or business colleagues prefer to post short URLs to keep their tweets or Facebook status updates concise.

The problem with short URLs is that they eliminate the user’s ability to read the real web address and decide if a link is safe to follow. For instance, a colleague’s tweet may indicate that a link leads to a New York Times article, but since the link isn’t visible, there’s no way of knowing where the link will take the user. Many recent Twitter spam attacks use shortened URLs that lead to malware-laden sites.

Cisco says that after an examination of weblog data from more than 4000 Cisco web security customers, the impact of social media usage on the enterprise is clear. As much as 2 percent of all web traffic in these businesses comes from accessing social media sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. “While 2 percent may seem like a small number in terms of an employee’s total daily web browsing, it indicates an increase in an organization’s need to educate employees on potential losses which could occur via social media,” said Christopher Burgess, a senior security advisor to the Chief Security Officer at Cisco.

The full report can be found on Cisco’s website.