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Social Networks Attract Malware Authors
Looks like the Zanga attack on MySpace last summer was a bellwether. Tiny Tuba writes, "Parents and social network users have one more thing to worry about. According to a
PC World article, increasingly bad guys are booby-trapping sites like My Space and Webshots with malware in the form of links, ads, bogus invitations to view pictures, and more." From the article: "Like pickpockets at a festival, money-minded malware authors are drawn by the huge crowds visiting social networking sites."
*downloads your bank account information*
That'd be Zango. Anyway, why wouldn't they release malware through myspace? It's userbase is huge. From the point of view of the mal..ware..ist(?), it's the ultimate distribution medium.
You're joking right? I can hardly believe...
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Huge clueless crowds gawping at $deity-knows-what and not paying attention.
Film at 11.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Come on, we all knew it was a matter of time.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
According to a PC World article, increasingly bad guys are booby-trapping sites like My Space and Webshots with malware in the form of links, ads, bogus invitations to view pictures, and more.
What, you mean that's not what normally passes for content on MySpace?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is going to make the general population more aware of 'internet sanitation'. Its going to enter the public consciousness that there are some nasty things out there. People probably won't learn that using IE is like picking up a dirty syringe that washed up on the beach, but they may be a little more careful about what they click.
Expect snakeoil anti-malware companies to flourish as well.
Who wants to pay $900+ million USD for this crime-infested website that probably have more cops pretending to be sexually active little girls than actual users?
Is it just me, or is everyone else having trouble understanding why this is news.
Ants are invading picnics... news at 11.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I wonder how many Windows users know how to use Netstat -a -n. It's amazing how much BSD stuff Bill and his friends pulled into their OSes. That will give you a pretty good idea of where your computer is trying to go.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
bad guys are booby-trapping sites like My Space
Lots of kids use MySpace, so please leave boobies out of this. Please think of the children. Thanks.
Developers: We can use your help.
Clearly what we need in response to this new threat is more laws. We must outlaw things so that our children can be protected from these online predators. And while we may not be sure exactly what to outlaw, surely we can start by outlawing things that are new or used by strange people. It may not solve the problem, but we can't know for sure until we start outlawing things. In this new world of threats that have never been seen before, we have to have the courage to pass laws before we know what is wrong. The only other option is to wait until after the ambiguous threat has caused the damage it may or may not intend to cause. We simply cannot stand idly by and let that maybe happen.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Come on, these are the same people who fell for "this email contains a virus" before there was Outlook.
These are people who worried about a knock from the cops when their program performed an illegal access and had to be shut down.
There are over three billion women in the world and none of them want to have sex with me. That, my friends (*), is rejection.
(*) I also anticipate your rejecting my friendship.
Flies like shit.
Fleas like dogs.
Homer like beer.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Geeks taking over social spaces. Will wonders never cease?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Browse random myspace pages with care. I have had many full system lockups navigating through the different sites. I don't know how these people get so many friends when thier sites are causing peoples computers to crash.
As the saying goes "Shit attracts flies".
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.
The first is that the system is centralized. Therefore, any spammers, spimmers, or whatever they're called on social networking sites, who decide to set up shop have only to contend with a sign up process, and maybe a captcha. Other than that, the burden is put on myspace.com itself. The spammers get a free ride.
The answer to this is to create a more decentralized social networking system. Like I've said before, I'm working on an open source project like that called Appleseed, but some of the ways I can foresee stopping spammers from setting up fake profiles and all that is to a) use a sender-stores system for messaging, so that the burden of storing and maintaining messages is put on the spammer. Want to send out a million messages? Sure. But be sure to be willing to host those messages indefinitely until their recipients decide to pick them up. Oh, and as far as accountability goes, it'll be a lot easier to find you. Also, b) By distributing social networking into specialized nodes, you now have a lot large pool of people willing to get rid of spammers. Each node will have a dedicated admin, so knocking off one or two fake profiles every so often isn't so hard. But MySpace has 50,000,000 people on one site. Sometimes it seems like they don't care about spammers, but honestly, it's probably just that they're incapable of removing all of them as fast as they're created. "Never attribute to malice" and all that...
The other important factor? Men are idiots. I see these fake profiles that scream "no fucking way I'm real", and it'll have hundreds of knucklehead friends. It seems creating a profile that says,
"Hi, I'm Emily! I'm 19 years old, bisexual, and I just moved to Detroit from Cali! I like to party, have fun, dance, and have naughty sex! Come over and see me on my webcam over here..."
is all you need to do to create the requisite blood flow displacement which makes most dudes take a few steps back on the evolutionary ladder. Just like spam, you can take a technical approach, and that can go a far way to defeating it, but as long as there are dudes out there with barbed wire bicep tattoos, backwards hats, throwing up fake gang signs in their bedroom in front of a Sublime poster willing to be duped by the simplest of scams, there's not much we can do. Possibly a well educated, self-confident, and sexually liberation female population who absolutely refused to have sex with these cro-magnons until they opened a book might help. But like a sender-stores system, some of them might get through anyways.
Wait. You mean where people congregate and very sparse places are prime targets for crime? onoz! zomg!
Once again, the brats are finding out that no one spanks them for hogging all the toys for themselves, thus ruining the park for everyone, themselves included.
They've ruined
- Halloween with their pins and razors
- The rivers and lakes with their pollution
- Usenet and email with their cursed spam
- Flying with their crazy jihad
- The cities with their gang banging
And now- Social networking
What's next? Will they float massive billboards in the sky to advertize their stupid products, begin jamming satellite radio to fill the airwaves with their putrid commercials, or introduce genetically modified weeds that spell the name of the unholy goods they push to us in 72000 point Courier as we walk through what were previously our own yards?Wasn't Webshots already malware?
With this adware, users will be able to enjoy ad infestations both while on and off MySpace.
Hacking into some system, to install malware or whatever, is already illegal. One wonders why these people are not more often found and thrown in prison. Considering that quite a few of them show advertisements (adware) or contact some global host owned by somebody (spyware) it ought not to be very hard to follow the money and find the culprit. Web sites have ownership, and so are trackable. Companies have ownership, and so can be found. Companies that sell stuff can definitely be found and very easily. Why isn't the police arresting them?
I know this is a tad off topic, but you would think Slashdot readers - of all people - would know how to tag. But I continuously see the word "duh" as a tag, for bloody near every story. Why? It's not a very descriptive tag. And the smug asshat who uses duh tag is really showing how stupid he is.
Start tagging right people, or get off slashdot. Maybe Yahoo answers will take ya!
Isn't that preaching to the choir around here? The only thing I could making it worse is to be using AOL to fire up IE, then hit myspace.
He who laughs last is at 300 baud.
127.0.0.1 localhost
...
...
...
127.0.0.1 myspace.com
127.0.0.1 webshots.com
127.0.0.1 aol.com
The kids will hate it, but they're not the ones who pay me.
zanga or zango. The blurb above says zanga ( xanga is a blog site) and the linked article says zango. Is the author and the editor accusing xanga of attacking myspace?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
9 out of 10 pedophile predators prefer hanging out where there tens of thousands of underaged kids instead of a church ... film at 11.
... film at 11.
... does anyone remember like .. 5 years ago ... if you met someone online and established any sort of a relationship with them, you were considered a freak?
... people are fickle, bandwagoning idiots ... Film at 11.
9 out of 10 spammers prefer large bodies of largely ignorant masses that will do exactly what they are told to do; that don't have a clue and don't want one
Say
This just in
I used netstat to figure out why my IIS was unreachable from outside the computer it was on.
Had nothing to do with port forwarding or NAT... a typo set my firewall to explicitly "block" the ports it used instead of "allow" them. Netstat didn't fix something like user error, but let me eliminate the other options.
Oh well.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Why is this post exactly the same as this one? http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=198901&cid= 16297167 Mistakenly hit the cut'n'paste key instead of typing your own reply?
henry -- the human evolution news relay
How about this...you are so bored and gay that you have nothing better to do with your time? What are you going to do next, watch hentai with your boyfriend? Get off slashdot, queer.
I agree with a lot of other people here: this isn't that surprising. However, social networking is a fairly powerful medium in that you can give masses of people incentives to sign up and hop on the same bandwagon simply by having other people around, which is effectively costless. Knowing this, the idea behind CommonRoom (http://www.commonroom.com) is to use that kind of momentum, however frivilous its basis is in reality, to specifically *prevent* these kinds of attacks from taking place by validating everyone on the network (also not a new concept, just rarely done in practice). We have yet to see what might happen if a generally-available network authenticated everyone--would it have the same degree of malicious code in the forms of spam, viruses, and spyware? My guess is no, but I guess we'll find out eventually if CommonRoom or something like it ever catches on.
Anywhere people might congregate attracks liars, thieves and cheats...
The online world is no different than the real world. Look at security for huge sporting or other public events. Look at the joke our airports are.
If a lot of people are going to be spending time somewhere, online or real world, shader fucks will show up and try to screw shit up at some point.
No sig for you!!
Browse safely with a Mac or from Linux instead.
you had me at #!