Myspace becomes ripe territory for cybercriminals

astros99 · #1 (**permalink**) 12-27-2006, 09:34 PM

MySpace devotee Kary Rogers was expecting to see a gut-busting video when a friend from the popular online hangout messaged him a link.

First, though, he was directed to a page where he was supposed to re-enter his password. Rogers realized that someone was trying to steal his information, and he didn't take the bait. At best, he would be spammed with junk e-mails; worse, the Web thief might steal his real-life identity.

"I immediately went back and changed my password," said Rogers, 29, a network analyst for Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss.

MySpace bills itself as a "place for friends." Increasingly, it is also a place for unfriendly attacks from digital miscreants on the prowl, luring users to sexually explicit Web sites, clogging mailboxes with spam messages and playing on the trust users have when speaking to "friends" to obtain passwords that could lead to identity theft.

Managing the risks that come with rapid growth is an enormous challenge for MySpace, now part of the News Corp. (NEWS) media conglomerate.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,238877,00.html

mini_0 · #2 (**permalink**) 04-11-2007, 02:29 PM

A lot has been said about the things going on the myspace .com website . To check the things , i recently created a myspace account , one more peculiar thing that i have noticed there is that on a large scale you get friend requess from people who are musicians and sell their content there . Also the people into internet dating charging a fees . These are two businesses riping over there with all these fake profiles . Many profiles , you can just see and tell that they are fake and since it is too big and with so many users , keeping a check on it is a cumbersome task .

astros99 · #3 (**permalink**) 04-14-2007, 01:33 AM

Yeah I also was on myspace and I noticed that you get many random friend request, event invitations, and group invites. Also, I noticed that myspace has been spammed horribly recently. There are spam comments, messages, and bulletins. And yes, there are many many many fake profiles. Some of them are after young children, and the rest are there for other purposes..

mini_0 · #4 (**permalink**) 04-24-2007, 05:35 PM

yes , it has been spammed like hell , like i just joined four to five groups and found that people send bulletins every five hours to the high membership groups they do not care for the links and there is seriously no check , plus the technique of firstly adding a huge number of friends and then sending bulletins when you cross the 1000 mark is just so annoying .

astros99 · #5 (**permalink**) 05-01-2007, 09:46 PM

Yeah it really is annoying to see all those comments, messages, and bulletins going out like that. Especially when they are nothing but spam. The founder of MySpace, Tom, says they have filed many lawsuits and that they are working hard to fix it. So, I guess they are moving in the right direction.

panggz · #6 (**permalink**) 05-03-2007, 02:51 AM

good, at least they say they're trying to fix the problem..
another site that's starting to have the same problems is friendster.com..
not that frequently tho, but i've received a numbr of msgs that turned out to be just spam and they really annoyed me..
those were sent by different registered users (no display photos) but they all had the same msg..