MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

I read a very disturbing post on Bruce Clay’s blog this morning about hackers in Australia using your personal information on social networks to steal your identities.

Jason West from the Marketing Pilgrim wrote about a story for The Sydney Morning Herald about a 25-year-old female that was being harassed by someone that stole her identify and created a false MySpace profile. The profile included comprising photos, lewd remarks, and the woman’s home address and phone number. She realized that this had happened after old men started, emailing, texting and some showing up on her doorstep. Scary.

Identity theft is a major issue and with the advent of Social Networking sites popping up all over the place, our personal information is at a serious risk. When you register for these sites you are requested to include in depth personal info. Hackers have caught on and it’s bound to go spiraling out of control.

As stated in the article, Internet identity theft is an alarming new brand of stalking, harassment and defamation. It’s what happens when MySpace becomes MyStalkerSpace. It isn’t just MySpace. There’s also Facebook, which bills itself as a “social utility that connects you with the people around you”. These sites allow people or groups to create identities and make cyberspace connections.

Given the popularity of such sites, horror stories are inevitable. Last year, Associated Press reported police were investigating whether up to seven girls aged 12 to 16 had been sexually assaulted by men they met on MySpace.

I went on to google the story and it took me to this website called Ha.ckers, here you see a blog post with the subject - Phising social network sites.

According to searchsecurity.com, the definition of Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients.

Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. This is used to gather personal info and details on Myspace, Facebook etc.

The blog post on Ha.ckers is an interview with a hacker that gives guidelines and advice on how to Phish successfully and make some serious money out of it. The guy claims that he makes around $500 per victim.

What is even more frightening is that there were 31 encouraging responses to this post. With guys named Lithium (blog author) and Snake, it’s easy to see that these guys are serious about their business and are spreading the word fast amongst the hacking community.

According to that Snake chap - 13.7MM people have had their identities stolen and he, on average can make use of only 1 out of 1/100 that means that really 137MM users have been hacked with no dire results (at least yet).

These guys are not here for hair-cuts, this is serious business and it’s up to every one of us to be aware of this and keep our personal details private and out of reach of these malicious people, before our identities are stolen too!