McAfee, the giant security vendor, has predicted that the rolling in of the year 2010 will bring with itself an increased threat to users of social networking website and media portals like Facebook and Twitter.

"In 2009 we saw increased attacks on websites, exploit cocktails thrown at unsuspecting users, infrastructure failure via natural and unnatural causes, and 'friendly fire' become a larger problem than ever. With Facebook reaching more than 350 million users, we expect that 2010 will take these trends to new heights", McAfee said, while releasing its "2010 Threat Predictions" report.

McAfee has pointed out that hackers and authors of Malware "love" to follow the "social networking buzz" in addition to "hot spots of activity", and the trend is set to continue in 2010.

The report has sounded a warning that just like Google and other providers "crack down on search engine poisoning", Twitter and other social networking services will hold added appeal to serve such malicious purposes.

Also, the huge popularity of iPhone applications has made them just as attractive. "Users blindly distribute applications; with the widespread availability of stolen credentials it could become very easy to launch and share these rogue apps across a wide population", says the report.