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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.
Setup whitelist of sites your children can go to.
One way of doing this is via your router (Newer D-Links have this feature).
You can also use opendns.com, set it to filter everything desired, then make exceptions if needed.
This prevents them from going to domains without you first checking them out. I suggest you ask them to write a sites they frequent or check their browser history to get a base whitelist.
Probably already is one of these, but can we get a plugin for Firefox that dumbs down the browser for them.
I think one of the toy company's had a toy/software setup where kids could visit a limited amount of sites using a special controller. Something to keep them out of trouble.
I want to give my kid a login with just a link to firefox and this plugin on the desktop. They click it an are presented with a list of safe sites. Any attempt to go outside of the domain is blocked and the sound card goes crazy with ("hey mom and dad get your ass in here and watch your kid")....hell have it text me. If the domain is safe I simply type a password and it gets added.
Sure just surfing in Firefox will prevent some of this, but I don't want any chance of any sort of firefox bug getting exposed. Remember that even firefox can fall victim to some sort of buffer overflow.
A little offtopic, but I think a Live CD of Ubuntu that accomplishes this would be great. Just give my kid an older computer with no harddrive and the CD and let them go...
My daughter spent an entire road trip (two days in the car each way) unlocking her NeoPet. The beeping was enough to make you drive with your elbows so you had both hands free to pull your ears off. Now I can simply say, "honey, if you play with your NeoPet character online, bad people will take all Daddy's money away and we'll have to live under a bridge." Aaaahhh, another aggravation averted. Thanks, scammers!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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?
Amputation. At the hip. Preferably sterilization. And THEN let them do public service for the rest of their lives.
Ok, ok, a wee bit drastic. Or is it? It's the only way I can think of (the sterilization thing, anyway) which gives humanity a chance somewhere in the future, if not now.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
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.
We could just get our kids real pets...
My 28-yo girlfriend plays it, and so do many of her 20-30-something friends... there are plenty of adults on Neopets...
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.
I'm no parent
What you do, then, is you print out your post, and save it in a safe place. Then, read it again, on your first child's 9th birthday, and realize what an ass you sounded like in your callow youth. It's very humbling, and good for the soul. When I first started posting on Usenet in 1991, before I had children, I wrote some incredibly stupid and glib things about parents and parenting. I ran across a box filled with print-outs from that era about six months ago (yes, I did print out my Usenet posts... I was in love with the sound of my own voice way back then too) and was startled by my trite ignorance. I am trying to learn from that experience in lots of ways, but it's a wisdom only painfully won.
If they picked on kindergartners that would be a fair fight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Neither is any other Slashdot poster. Think about it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Because it is impossible for a kid to play baseball in the park all day and then play a video game for half an hour after dinner.
And there's never weather conditions that make playing outside not such a great option.
Oh wait you could have your atari and still do sports, but no one else can take part in more than one activity? You are special!
You're 'startled' mostly because parents spend a great deal of time compromising their [parenting] ethics away. It's hard to raise kids the way you think you will when you don't have - and 99% of all parents give up trying, while convincing themselves they aren't. (And loudly bleat "you don't have kids, you can't possibly know" to drown out their conscience.)
And then the rest of us pay for your self delusions as yet another generation of Dr. Spock derived badly raised children reach adulthood.
You clearly don't live in a city. It would be nice if nobody needed to, but most people do. Playing outside is ... risky. Traffic is only one of the reasons.
I'll agree that staying inside at that age isn't healthy, but neither is being outside and unsupervised. (And, yes, when I was growing up I did that, and it was essentially safe. That doesn't make it safe now.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
You're 'startled' mostly because parents spend a great deal of time compromising their [parenting] ethics away. It's hard to raise kids the way you think you will when you don't have - and 99% of all parents give up trying, while convincing themselves they aren't.
There is definitely an element of that (google project yes badmommymoments for a really awesome essay about getting back on track).
But I also see a metric ton of people who say they'll do this or that differently from people they know, and what they don't realize is, it WON'T WORK. Or, might not work with their kids. It turns out that children, far from being the blank slate at birth hypothesized by Piaget, have inborn personalities and temperaments that require individualized responses.
My oldest is "low persistence," which was highly convenient in the toddler years, because I could just hold a cabinet closed for a couple minutes and then he'd forget he ever wanted to open it... but it'll be a really difficult thing for him to cope with as he gets older, and has to work at things that don't come naturally. My younger son is VERY persistent, and if I just hold the cabinet closed, he will keep trying for a good minute, then will scream and rant (at 14 months, he may not be much for talking, but yes, he can RANT), then will, I kid you not, try to FAKE ME OUT so I will let go and he can go back and open that cabinet. We never needed to install child locks and such for kid #1, but definitely need them for kid #2.
A friend of mine followed the Continuum Concept parenting approach with her oldest, teaching him how to use the tools in his environment properly, rather than simply restricting access. At just over a year, he could put a DVD in the player right-side up, and they never had to worry about him sticking a cracker in there instead. So I asked her for advice when my oldest turned out to be the Implacable Destructo-Baby, who would systematically toss everything left on the coffee table over his shoulder, for example. She smiled, and nodded, and sort of implied I wasn't trying hard enough. Then her second hit that age, and she emailed me an apology... she now had her own Implacable Destructo-Baby, and wanted MY advice!
So people who have never raised a kid talk about how *their* kids will do this or won't do that, but the truth is, they have NO IDEA what the implementation is going to look like until they get there.
So while I agree that there's the issue of getting lazy and compromising one's parental ethics, I think a large part of the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do has to do with having no idea how to actually implement their grand designs with the children they get.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?