Slashdot Mirror
Scammers Target Neopets Users
An anonymous reader writes "If you have children that play on the popular virtual world game Neopets, you might want to warn them of a social engineering scam gleefully targeting 12-year-old kids. Neopets users looking for rare items are sent private messages from the scammers, who direct them to sites hosting keyloggers & trojans. They then use the infected PC as a means to get to data the parents might have stored there, be it credit card details, Paypal accounts or online banking. Seeing the screenshots of some of these people talking about putting these children into botnets is just unbelievable — if ever you wanted proof that people up to no good online will go to any lengths to get their hands on some money (or even just feel good about outsmarting a 12-year-old), here it is."
Jeeze, all scammers are scum of the earth. Why would you expect them to be any different with 12 yo kids?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
My kids never got into Neopets, but they have been really into Webkinz for the past year or so. I like the way Webkinz handles things a lot better...there are no open areas where people can chat about just anything. They can chat in common rooms, but only by picking things to say out of a list. There is no possibility of sending links or other such nastiness.
Even sites that do have forums like Nick.com have moderators approve every post. I'm sure it's more expensive to run it that way, but I would think if your site is built to cater to young children, it's incumbent on you to either moderator-approve every posting like Nick does or limit postings to pre-approved phrases like Webkinz does. Anything else is just asking for trouble.
Whatever you do, don't blame the parents for:
1. Putting sensitive info on their computer, then
2. Letting their kid use that computer unsupervised, while
3. Leaving that computer relatively unguarded against intrusion.
Sure, not every parent can be expected to be a genius, but if you're going to let children use a computer on the internet, you have responsibilities to act as a sysadmin.
Not to mention responsibilities to act as a guardian. Just as with TV, the computer is not a babysitter. Worse, a net-connected computer is a social interaction tool where every pervert and scammer in the world has direct access to your child. And you're really going to just let them hang out alone with those people?
The real solution is for the kids to have their own computer. And the adults do not use it for online banking, or anything else.
It's hard to believe the cost would be a problem, but if a netbook is too dear, old PCs are being given away. Put Linux on it, and it's their online playpen.
No need to argue about porn and whatnot. All of those concerns can be addressed depending as the age of the computer's owner varies.
Targeting the weakest link in the security chain? Who would have thought the spammers would do that? Alright, it's scummy to target this towards kids, but it has happened since the start of the internet. Think back to the bad old days of AOL and Compuserve chats, or telling scriptkidz that your ip address was 127.0.0.1 and to 'hack me if you dare'.
What does surprise me, is that people are letting their kids play on websites while logged in as administrator. How computer savvy do you have to be to realize this is a bad idea. Admin on their own computer, maybe. If you make them clean up their own mess and just smile when they lose their Neopet.
Having no idea what Neopets was, I decided to Google it. A quick glance at the front page www.neopets.com tells me it's sort of an MMO for young kids.
I'm no parent, but hell, the intended audience of this game should be PLAYING OUTSIDE and PRACTICING SPORTS, not learning to get hooked on MMOs. I know I was, even though my parents got me an Atari, I still had to go to swimming lessons at 6 a.m. before school (oh yeah, no heated swimming pool).
And they wonder why obesity rates are at an all-time high, geez!!
12 year olds have no business being unsupervised on a computer with internet access.
Don't forget a separate "kid only" login. That way, they can't accidentally delete mommy & daddy's Quicken info, and their unprivledged account will be less likely to be able to jump into other accounts and/or the system. Maybe.
Please help metamoderate.
20 minutes? really? Way back in the stone-age, when I was a kid we'd spend hours exploring what our amazing Commodore 64s and Apple IIs could do. We'd dial into BBSs, and run our own. We'd write our own software, and tinker with other peoples' code. Sometimes we'd end up in places we weren't welcome (Hello Joshua, shall we play a game?). Our parents hadn't the vaguest understanding of what we were up to (boys? Why is the phone making a funny whistling sound? Did you hook up that video game thing to it?). We're the application developers and software engineers, the IT architects, and the hardware engineers now. Our understanding of how these machines work come from all the hours we spent exploring them as children.
It's fun to demonize children "wasting their time" on the internet, but it's part of our world, and worthy of exploration. I hear all the time about how "this latest generation" is made up of computer geniuses since they grew up with them, but honestly, most of the ones I talk to know virtually nothing about these machines other than day-to-day use. They can't fix'em, they can't upgrade'em, and they still make horrible messes of them that leave an actual power-user scratching their heads. Maybe, just maybe, the whole idea of heavily supervised "play-dates" with their computers plays into this. At their most curious ages they're told not to touch, not to explore, and in the end they turn out not really learning any of the really cool things that they could do.....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.