Interesting People mailing list archives
re: My annoyance at Social Networking sites
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 10:21:07 +0900
-----Original Message----- From: Neil Schwartzman [mailto:neil () cauce org] Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 10:27 PM To: dave () farber net Cc: ip () v2 listbox com Subject: Re: [IP] My annoyance at Social Networking sites Dave Farber wrote:
of course, giving someone your Yahoo login could be DISASTROUS... if that person were untrustworthy (and if they were trustworthy, IMHO, they wouldn't ask for it) they could change your password and lock YOU out of your account... disastrous indeed, if (say) you use that ID as the owner of one or more Yahoogroups...! They could take over your owner/moderator rights, axe the groups you own, retrieve and abuse the subscriber lists of those groups... the list of damages possible is nearly endless.
The consequences could be far worse than that! This is, after all, phishing in essence if not in practice. Y! and Google and I expect others in the freemail space have 'wallet' functions with credit card information stored. There are now third-party services offering to find all of your friends on social-networking services, all you need to do is ... you guessed it, enter your freemail usename and password. A perfect vector for a huge security issues, MIM attacks and so on, should those take off too. I expect someone will breach one of the social networks, and then go through the accounts of sign-ups from one of the giamt freemailers. Then, all queries for address-book mining coming from the social networking sites will be declined. I've raised this issue with two of the major freemail sites, so far to no avail apparently. I expect it will take something really bad happening to prompt action on their part to disallow this stupidity. -- == Neil Schwartzman Executive Director CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email Canada: +1 (514) 485 9713 US: +1 (303) 800 6345 UK: +44 020 8144 6345 France: +33 0870 406 662 Skype: spamfighter666 Fax: +1 (419) 793 0430 [Web]: http://cauce.org See http://stopspamhere.ca for ways to prevent spam from hitting your inbox. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- My annoyance at Social Networking sites Dave Farber (Aug 05)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- re: My annoyance at Social Networking sites Dave Farber (Aug 07)