Social Networks Attract Malware Authors

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!

*downloads your bank account information*

Zanga?

That'd be Zango. Anyway, why wouldn't they release malware through myspace? It's userbase is huge. From the point of view of the mal..ware..ist(?), it's the ultimate distribution medium.

Wait..

You're joking right? I can hardly believe...

in other news

"Like pickpockets at a festival, money-minded malware authors are drawn by the huge crowds visiting social networking sites."

Huge clueless crowds gawping at $deity-knows-what and not paying attention.

Film at 11.

Well gosh.

How suprising

...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.

Come on, we all knew it was a matter of time.

normal?

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.

What, you mean that's not what normally passes for content on MySpace?

a learning experience

This is going to make the general population more aware of 'internet sanitation'. Its going to enter the public consciousness that there are some nasty things out there. People probably won't learn that using IE is like picking up a dirty syringe that washed up on the beach, but they may be a little more careful about what they click.

Expect snakeoil anti-malware companies to flourish as well.

So...

Who wants to pay $900+ million USD for this crime-infested website that probably have more cops pretending to be sexually active little girls than actual users?

Add the Duh! tag now

Is it just me, or is everyone else having trouble understanding why this is news.

Ants are invading picnics... news at 11.

Yet another reason to use Linux

I wonder how many Windows users know how to use Netstat -a -n. It's amazing how much BSD stuff Bill and his friends pulled into their OSes. That will give you a pretty good idea of where your computer is trying to go.

Boobies

bad guys are booby-trapping sites like My Space

Lots of kids use MySpace, so please leave boobies out of this. Please think of the children. Thanks.

Quick! Outlaw Something!

Clearly what we need in response to this new threat is more laws. We must outlaw things so that our children can be protected from these online predators. And while we may not be sure exactly what to outlaw, surely we can start by outlawing things that are new or used by strange people. It may not solve the problem, but we can't know for sure until we start outlawing things. In this new world of threats that have never been seen before, we have to have the courage to pass laws before we know what is wrong. The only other option is to wait until after the ambiguous threat has caused the damage it may or may not intend to cause. We simply cannot stand idly by and let that maybe happen.

It's already outlawed

Hacking into some system, to install malware or whatever, is already illegal. One wonders why these people are not more often found and thrown in prison. Considering that quite a few of them show advertisements (adware) or contact some global host owned by somebody (spyware) it ought not to be very hard to follow the money and find the culprit. Web sites have ownership, and so are trackable. Companies have ownership, and so can be found. Companies that sell stuff can definitely be found and very easily. Why isn't the police arresting them?

In other news...

Flies like shit.
Fleas like dogs.
Homer like beer.

My, oh my!

"increasingly bad guys are booby-trapping sites like My Space and Webshots"

So, the problem is not that there are more malware authors, but that they are getting worse. LOL.

Geeks in MySpace

Geeks taking over social spaces. Will wonders never cease?

This should be no surprise...

As the saying goes "Shit attracts flies".

A few things here...

There's a few factors which have made myspace a cesspool spawning marketing and advertising demons left and right.

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.

Ads Either Way

With this adware, users will be able to enjoy ad infestations both while on and off MySpace.

Captain Obvious!

In addition, Dan Moniz, a security consultant in San Francisco, recommends using a browser other than Internet Explorer.

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

127.0.0.1 localhost
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?

zanga or zango. The blurb above says zanga ( xanga is a blog site) and the linked article says zango. Is the author and the editor accusing xanga of attacking myspace?

Film at 11 ...

9 out of 10 pedophile predators prefer hanging out where there tens of thousands of underaged kids instead of a church ... film at 11.

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 ... film at 11.

Say ... does anyone remember like .. 5 years ago ... if you met someone online and established any sort of a relationship with them, you were considered a freak?

This just in ... people are fickle, bandwagoning idiots ... Film at 11.

An Alternative Way of Thinking

I agree with a lot of other people here: this isn't that surprising. However, social networking is a fairly powerful medium in that you can give masses of people incentives to sign up and hop on the same bandwagon simply by having other people around, which is effectively costless. Knowing this, the idea behind CommonRoom (http://www.commonroom.com [commonroom.com]) is to use that kind of momentum, however frivilous its basis is in reality, to specifically *prevent* these kinds of attacks from taking place by validating everyone on the network (also not a new concept, just rarely done in practice). We have yet to see what might happen if a generally-available network authenticated everyone--would it have the same degree of malicious code in the forms of spam, viruses, and spyware? My guess is no, but I guess we'll find out eventually if CommonRoom or something like it ever catches on.

Headline should read...

Anywhere people might congregate attracks liars, thieves and cheats...

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

Browse safely with a Mac or from Linux instead.

Re:speaking of social networks

There are over three billion women in the world and none of them want to have sex with me. That, my friends (*), is rejection.

You can always try men... or animals.

Re:speaking of social networks

There are over three billion women in the world and none of them want to have sex with me.

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!