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."
Oh no! My lacy bra just fell off of my first post! (Score:4, Funny)
Troll (Score:2)
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Plus, he's SO right. Idiots who click links to malware deserve whatever happens to them. That, and a beating. A beating every time. Maybe Pavlov's will work even on idiots. I know for a fact it even works on sub-par animals.
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Zanga? (Score:3, Informative)
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The word you're looking for is malwareorist.
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Wait.. (Score:1)
in other news (Score:3, Funny)
Huge clueless crowds gawping at $deity-knows-what and not paying attention.
Film at 11.
Well gosh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on, we all knew it was a matter of time.
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normal? (Score:5, Funny)
What, you mean that's not what normally passes for content on MySpace?
a learning experience (Score:2, Insightful)
Expect snakeoil anti-malware companies to flourish as well.
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This will open up the way for Norton MySpace Security Only $29.95 a year!
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If all the other 0day attacks that have existed and the old classics which still rumble on aren't enought to make people care nothing will, not even myspace. Someone who lives in my building has a worm which could easily be stopped if they updated XP (It keeps trying to probe my linux box and registers as "microsoft-ds" on port 445, if you're wondering), but some people will just never ca
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I think the probability that that will happen is astronomically high.
I still think people will be worried and carefull. They might manage to remove the recycling bin from their desktop if they get some idea that its dirty and has viruses or worms growing on it.
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Really? I think it's less than (but not by much!) or equal to one.
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Tag this "too easy to ignore".
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Even if they're told, will they believe it?
believe it? (Score:2, Funny)
These are people who worried about a knock from the cops when their program performed an illegal access and had to be shut down.
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So... (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Add the Duh! tag now (Score:4, Insightful)
Ants are invading picnics... news at 11.
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Yet another reason to use Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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Not many. They don't have to. Note this is posted from linux, which I use because I like doing all sorts of programming related things with my computer and don't mind editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to go multihead etc. My users use Windows and are comfortable there because while it doesn't often do as much, it does it easier for the most part. Which is what they want.
Linux is where the backend stuff is going. Windows is still what all the client e
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MS Windows easier? Easier than Slackware or OpenBSD maybe. They are just used to Windows. Though I think most of them wouldn't notice if you changed their installs to Linux running KDE. Except they would think someone had changed their icons. The only real problem with Linux and other alternative OSes is the fact most software vendors only write programs for MS Windows, and that API is too contrived to easily clone.
Look at Wine. From what I've seen, a lot of people have done quite a bit of work on wine, y
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Me! (Score:2)
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.
Boobies (Score:3, Funny)
Lots of kids use MySpace, so please leave boobies out of this. Please think of the children. Thanks.
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<sing>Mammaries...Like the corners of my mind</sing>
Quick! Outlaw Something! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's already outlawed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The prisons are too full of drug users.
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Is our children learning?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
-1, there mods, I did it for you
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You can always try men... or animals.
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You haven't met all three billion women. Why do you think God created crack cocaine? Scrape the cobwebs off your wallet and buy a whore!
In other news... (Score:2)
Fleas like dogs.
Homer like beer.
My, oh my! (Score:1)
Geeks in MySpace (Score:1)
This should be no surprise... (Score:2)
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.
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URL plz! Do you take PayPal?
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Dude, no way i can be duped!!!
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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.
Ads Either Way (Score:1)
Captain Obvious! (Score:1)
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.
Advice for Parents (Score:2, Funny)
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.
ummm? (Score:2)
Film at 11 ... (Score:1)
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
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I'm confused; I thought 9 out of 10 pedophile predators were Catholic Priests?
An Alternative Way of Thinking (Score:1)
Headline should read... (Score:2)
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.
Headline should emphasise WINDOWS (Score:2)