MySpace Users Big Targets for ID Thieves

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT/AP: MySpace Users Big Targets for ID Thieves
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 25, 2006

....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 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media conglomerate. The site can't afford to drive away users, who might defect to one of a growing number of alternative sites, or advertisers, who pay top dollar to reach the growing MySpace audience....

A key reason behind the popularity is its ease. Simply by adding a few lines of computer code, users can create elaborate profiles and personalize them with photos, music and video. A host of communication tools makes it easy to send messages to one person or a whole list of friends, who number into the thousands for some of the more popular MySpace users.

Those same tools can be used by vandals to make it look like an innocent user has sent spam to the same long list of ''friends.''

Programmers are writing scripts that take advantage of specific features on MySpace, including ''friend request,'' where one user asks to be added to another user's list of buddies....

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-MySpace-Security.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[lies and propaganda]

1. just as any interneting, a little common sense goes far.

dont add the obviously fake, web cam porn pages. dont click on any links from anyone you dont know, or even if you do and the links just look fishy.
Its the bulletin links that will get ya though. Dont click on them because thats how they phish your password.