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You may think that your facebook account is benign. You don’t spend any money there and it’s not like criminals can gain access to your PIN number. However, criminals deem these accounts to be very valuable. Criminals steal log-in data for Facebook accounts, typically with “phishing” techniques that tricks users into disclosing their passwords or with malware that logs keystrokes. They then use the accounts to send spam, distribute malicious programs and run identity and other fraud.
Facebook accounts are attractive because of the higher level of trust on the site than exists in the broader Internet. People are required to use their real names and tend to connect primarily with people they know.
Phishing returns to twitter with a different strategy. This time, Phishing is done through direct messages. Twitters will receive a message claiming that an embarrassing blog about you is circulating in the world wide web and you have to click a website usually in a tiny url form to view it.
Of course, your first impulse with messages like that is to verify the credibility of the the twit and you can only do that by clicking the link. The link will open a twitter-a-like page that will requires your log -in information. The website is not actually the twitter site rather a hoax site built to imitate twitter and trick you in giving your log-in details.
The real embarrassment will befall at you once the phishers got your twitter account for they will use it in spamming or worse, sending messages to your twitter network. If you become a victim of phishing, change your password and notify your network about the incident.
The best way to avoid Phishing in twitter as well as other Social Networking Sites is to avoid clicking dubious links. Don’t let phishers steal your log-in account for they will use your accounts in scams and spams.
The online review website, Yelp has been accused of extortion in the lawsuit that has been filed against the site in Los Angeles.
It has been alleged that the website attempted to wrest from a veterinary hospital by the name of Cats and Dogs in Long Beach, an amount of $300 per month for at-least a year. The amount was extorted in favor of the site repressing or deleting the reviews that tarnished the image of the hospital.
Yelp, it may be remembered is the leading site when it comes to reviews. Users find the San Francisco based site to be a great place to look for reviews on local business. Launched in 2004, the company has now spread throughout United States and opened up in the U.K. and Ireland last year.
The site’s slogan, “Real people, Real reviews” though is under scrutiny as the complaint that has been filed in the U.S. District Court states that the website manipulates and influences reviews for money. The allegation is that the site promises to delete or move the negative reviews to the bottom if an advertising subscription is purchased.
The suit is essentially filed by the owner of Cats and Dogs, Dr. Gregory Perrault. The story began when a negative review was posted on the site about the hospital and the doctor in particular. When Dr. Perrault complained about the same to Yelp regarding the irregularities in the visit of the user, the site complied and removed the statement. Within a week however, there was another user with another review which again seemed inappropriate to the doctor.
This time, even after the complaint, Yelp did not remove the review and soon he began to receive calls from the site’s staff who asked him to buy their advertising contract in lieu of removal of the negative comments.
This suit demonstrably has the backing of an East Bay Express article that had similar statements from numerous businesses who complained of the same extortion technique. Yelp, which recently turned down a $550 million offer by Google and had more than 9 million reviews in December alone, has denied the allegations and plans to fight the lawsuit aggressively.
Social Networking – Private things to keep in mind before you go public
Next time you go socializing, here are some of the things that you might want to keep in mind.
Do you want to go Public?
The first thing is to decide whether you want to make your profiles public or private. If you do go public, do not make jokes regarding your financial positions or anything else that can some day come back to haunt you. Remain true and there’s nothing to worry about.
Get rid of the extra
Does your network have people you know very little about? If so, be done with anyone you don’ really know or approve of. Keep your company with those that you really associate with.
Who are you connecting to?
Do not randomly accept invitations from all and sundry. Before saying yes, have a look at the profile of the concerned person. Take a moment and think about it. Do you befriend anyone you meet on the go? Not really. Why would you want to be any different with your virtual life then?
It may be possible that you just need to be publicly available. That doesn’t mean you cannot be careful with what you post. Take care.
With the advent of social networks, there’s nothing that you cannot know about a person online. From personal wishes to professional bursts, people are pouring their hearts out on Facebook and Twitter. It is being called the new way of socializing but there is something else that not many understand when they throw their life out in the open.
U.S. unique monthly visitors to Facebook grew 96.5 percent between January 2009 and January 2010, with over half the U.S. online population visiting during the course of the month, according to data from comScore.
As of this writing, grapevine has it that highly popular social networking hub, Twitter, is soon going to give Google a run for its money in the search ads business.
The core concept behind the theme is that the related ads (of the advertisers that sign up with Twitter) would show up when a user searches Twitter for a particular theme. The ads would conform to the standard twitter word count and would be no more 140 words.
A simple example may be a search for ‘cars’. This would result in an ad for a car firm that has tied up with Twitter. Hence those who do not search for anything would not be seeing any ads.
The success magnitude of this system of ad generation can be gauged from the wonders it has done for Google. These text ads that show up next to the search results in the Google Search Engine account for more than 60 percent of the total revenue that is generated by the firm annually.
The next in the ad business for Google is the Adsense program that allows users to place ads on their own websites and share the revenues with Google. And something similar that allows Twitter to place ads after some regular intervals on the tweeter’s page should be a logical extension of Twitter’s ad program.
This step although highly lucrative may not find favor with all of its users and hence the current step of starting with the searching part seems to be a good idea. There may not be a great deal of searching that goes around at Twitter as of yet but it is definitely a good place to start.