2008 And The New Phishing Sites
It is 2008 and information security experts from all over have unanimously predicted that phishing and other forms of social engineering will continue to be rampant… only this time, they will target the hugely popular social security sites.
Over the last couple of years, the popularity of sites like MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and Bebo has risen exponentially. Scores of people have signed up to these services to catch up with old friends and to make new ones.
They unabashedly post very intimate and personal information on these sites for public view. These same people wouldn’t reveal a thing if you asked them for this information in person. It is probably a perceived invisibility that the web gives to a person, that leads to this kind of indiscretions.
However, this wealth of information lies there in the open for criminals to exploit, and experts like Mary Landesman and David Porter predict that in 2008, this information will be under attack.
Many of them question the stability of the technology and the add ons that are in play in these social networking websites. These technologies have barely faced the brunt of a social engineering attack, so no one knows how long they can stand against a wave of these that might occur in 2008.
In fact, at the end of 2007 itself, a number of users of Google’s Orkut.com encountered an attack from a worm that tried to steal their bank account numbers. This malicious program was propagated through booby-trapped links placed on the profile pages of these Orkut members.
