Social Networks Attract Malware Authors 76
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."
A few things here... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [sourceforge.net], 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.
It's already outlawed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A few things here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Might also have something to do with the fact that the founders don't exactly have a problem with it seeing as how MySpace was founded by spammers [valleywag.com], not Tom. Tom is just the pretty wholesome face they put on there to get peopel to join.