Posted on 10/25/2009 2:38:58 PM PDT by nickcarraway
If you're on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim. Experts say cybercrooks are lurking just a mouse click away on popular social networking sites.
That's because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. It starts with a friend updating his or her status or sending you a message with an innocent link or video. Maybe your friend is in distress abroad and needs some help.
All you have to do is click.
When the message or link is opened, social network users are lured to fake Web sites that trick them into divulging personal details and passwords. The process, known as a phishing attack or malware, can infiltrate users' accounts without their consent. Once the account is compromised, the thieves can infiltrate the list of friends or contacts and repeat the attack on subsequent victims. Social networking sites show there is ample opportunity to find more victims; the average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site. "Security is a constant arms race," said Simon Axten, an associate for privacy and public policy at Facebook. "Malicious actors are constantly attacking the site, and what you see is actually a very small percentage of what's attempted."
As some social networking sites experience monstrous growth, they are becoming a new -- and extremely lucrative -- frontier for cybercrime. Facebook says it has 300 million users, nearly the size of the U.S. population, and it continues to attract users outside the college student niche.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I had an email recently requesting I update information on a site I’d set up my website URL through. I knew the URL contract wasn’t up until next year, and the email looked fishy to me, so I deleted it.
I don’t trust any of these things. I do something because I want to; not because someone else tells me to.
A whole bunch of idiots at our local paper had their Twitter accounts hacked when they clicked on a link that took them to a fake Twitter page.
They graciously entered their account details at something like dswwwsfsfdij.com, which had a fake Twitter login screen.
Their accounts were quickly used to send out porn spam and more malicious links.
If they had bothered to look at the URL, they would have known it wasn’t really Twitter.
It’s about being a moron, not being hacked.
I’m glad I stay away from these socializing websites.
Me too. But .. I have Norton and I never get that phishing stuff. I don’t know how people survive without Norton.
I’ve gotten emails claiming to be from Bank of America but the return email address is not BoA’s. I just email it to the webmaster.
ALWAYS check the return path and NEVER send information through an email.
Out local fishwrap had a story about a 16 year old local girl who was lured into meeting up with a pervert via an internet chatroom. Like the nasty internet was the cause of it all.
In my day, these young hussies painted themsleves up to look 21 and met up at the local bar, or the high school football game, or whatever. Yeah, the internet has made this kind of stuff easier, but somehow people managed to do the same crap long before Al Gore invented it.
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