On Monday, McAfee Labs released its 2010 Threat Predictions report to outline the tech threats enterprises and consumers should be wary of. Social networking and Adobe products are in the spotlight, along with banking Trojans, botnets and HTML 5.

"Sites such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the way we communicate, interact and share on the web," said David Marcus, security research manager for McAfee Avert Labs. "As user bases for the top online social destinations reach record highs, cybercriminals are building out their criminal toolkits, taking advantage of new technologies, third-party applications, and hot spots of activity to exploit users."

Malicious Networking?

What does this mean for the average surfer? According to Marcus, it means the next time you receive an invite from one of your Facebook friends to play a game that looks like it's shaping up to be the next Farmville, you should think twice before you click.

"In 2010, users are going to be more vulnerable to attacks that blindly distribute fake apps across their networks. The same goes for bit.ly's and TinyURLs," Marcus said. "As abbreviated URLs become more ubiquitous, it will be even easier for cybercriminals to mask and direct users to malicious sites."

Ken Dunham, director of global response for iSIGHT Partners, said social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will continue to gain media attention and be the focus of innovation, data mining, and targeted attacks in 2010.

"If you were to go in a room and ask how many people have social-networking accounts, pretty much the whole room is going to have their hands up," Dunham said. "We are in the information age and a lot of information about people are on these sites."

A Slew of Tech Threats

McAfee Labs also has another prediction in its 2010 report: Adobe will overtake Microsoft as the number-one target for cybercriminals. Marcus said Adobe products, particularly Acrobat Reader and Flash, have become two of the most widely used apps in the world. Cybercriminals go where the masses go, he said, and will have a field day preying on people using Adobe software.

Some good news is that the number of mobile attacks isn't growing rapidly -- at least not yet. "There's been a lot of talk about iPhone attacks of late. The mobile industry has learned lessons from attacks against other operating systems," Dunham said. "We expect to see more focus on mobile attacks, but as far as the risk exposure, it still remains somewhat limited and it's a slow-growing field."

In other McAfee predictions, banking Trojans will become even more sophisticated, with abilities to interrupt legitimate transactions and make unauthorized withdrawals under the radar screen. And malware will flood inboxes, particularly for corporations, journalists and individuals, via e-mail attachments. Botnets will move toward a peer-to-peer architecture, McAfee predicted, while HTML 5 and the evolution of the programming language open the door to new malware.

"Countering these trends, in 2010 McAfee predicts a good year for law enforcement and the ability to identify, track and combat cybercrime worldwide," Marcus said. "After a decade of cybersecurity research, coordination and training undertaken by agencies across the globe, the community will reap the benefits of the effort put forth over the past 10 years."