Social-networking 'spear phishers'

We hear an awful lot about predators on the social Web, but much less about problems that are expected to affect a whole lot more users – worms, malicious hackers and data miners. The San Jose Mercury News zoomed in on “spear phishers”: “criminals who send masked messages to a small number of people that appear to be from someone they know, as well as other, more general scams.” Orkut, a Google project that’s very popular in Brazil, has been with a worm gathering financial info and passwords, and earlier this month MySpace users were subjected to a phishing attack trying to steal their account info. Last fall, MySpace, the Mercury News says, MySpace was “ Last week, Orkut was hit with a worm seeking financial information and passwords. In early June, an instant-messenger phishing assault on My Space users tried to steal account information. One vulnerability is that MySpace allows users to insert HTML code in their profiles – code they often get out on the Web, sometimes from questionable sites that may be generating code that does more than it’s advertised to do.