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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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
There are over three billion women in the world and none of them want to have sex with me. That, my friends (*), is rejection.
You can always try men... or animals.
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