Opting Out Before Opting In Is Another Abuse Of Email With Security Risks
The peculiar popularity of social media is giving rise to a new class of phishing and security risks. Another digital variant of Gresham’s Law, the legitimate is being driven out by the fake. The best protection is to Just Say No, without saying anything.
Whatever social media is, might, or imagined to be, it is a fact of life that is adding even more noise to email in boxes, much of it dangerous. Whether Facebook or MySpace or Twitter or any of the mushroom-like wannabes, their inability of paying their own way doesn’t hinder the exploiters following PT Barnum’s observation about two takers for every sucker born.
Most of them have open Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, that provide anyone with even marginal computer programming skills to extend the ‘social’ side of the service in ways unforeseen and unaccountable. Which creates new opportunities for those who are ethically challenged.
It is easy to the point of being trivial to find names offered in emails as bait to click here and join these ‘friends’ online. The problem is that the click goes somewhere else that really looks like the place it says it is, there to collect even more personal information. The Brass Ring for these is to get into Outlook or Zimbra or whatever the local contact management program is. Once there, they can plant all kinds of things that few users would even detect, doing all kinds of mischief.
Even clicking the ‘remove me’ provides a wealth of information: IP Addresses, email client names with version numbers, routing information, gateway addresses, and more.
Whatever ‘social media’ is, regardless of the degree of attention deficit disorder that practitioners may have, it’s better to add these emails to the black list. If the senders are really your ‘friend’, then that can contact you through more verifiable means, be it a regular email, or even the original social media technology: The telephone.
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Tags: attention deficit disorder, facebook, information security, myspace, phishing, social media, twitter