Released: July 17, 2006

Phishers find easy pickings on social sites

Source: By Kim Hart, Washington Post (Free Registration)

Rob Newland is a pro at dodging spam e-mails and suspicious pop-up windows as he surfs the Web. But he lets his guard down when he is checking friends’ profiles and clicking through blog posts on the social networking Web site MySpace. “I’m there to meet new people, so I follow random messages and links,” the 24-year-old D.C. bartender said. “It seems harmless.”

Internet thieves are banking that the millions of users who log on to social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, are just as trusting, leaving them vulnerable to financial fraud and identity theft. As viewership skyrockets, growing by 50 percent in the past year, according to Nielsen-NetRatings, such sites are becoming vulnerable places for scams. The combination of young users and a culture that encourages sharing personal details presents opportunities for increasingly sophisticated methods to lure information.

The FBI last month warned MySpace users of a phony bulletin post urging people to click on a link to “check out old school pictures.” A virus seeking financial information recently invaded Orkut, Google’s social networking site. Early last month, unsolicited instant messages attempted to lure MySpace users into divulging account information, and about a dozen other sites that spoof the MySpace log-in page have been discovered.

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