Gone Phishin’ – Tweet Me Later

Hook, Line, Sinker (How I fell for a phishing scam) courtesy of ToastyKen

There is an inevitable pattern of migration in Social Media. I often tell people that we all “follow the kids.” I was 26 years old when I joined Friendster back in 2003, and I was still among the older people on the site. Then I heard about MySpace, and that space was primarily youth oriented. Until late 2006. Facebook was restircted to college students at the oldest. Then, inevitably, the site expands to include older people, until a point is reached where the youngsters seek out a new frontier. So if the first wave is young people and the second wave is everyone else, the third wave is inevitably Phishers and Spammers.

When I first went to Facebook, one of the main attractions it held over MySpace was the absence of comments  extolling the virtues of a $50 Macys Gift Card or a message saying “I can’t believe they took this picture of you”; while I would never click on those links, I know enough people would, enough to make it “profitable” for these people to keep at it. Now Facebook has spam wall posts and messages. While all of this is annoying enough, over the past few days, the line was crossed for me when I started seeing spam messages on Twitter. Turns out that several people have fallen for this scam, sent through Direct Message no less. While I’m not so naive as to think that anything online can remain “pure” forever, it’s disheartening to see a platform like this infiltrated – a platform that, while certainly very public, has a personal feel to it, and can create real and meaningful connections between people – whether for personal or business personal.

The paradigm of the Social Networking age says that it is better to form real relationships with the consumer than to fire buckshot aimlessly, hoping that someone will unwittingly click on a link you’ve sent. When we speak to groups, we always discuss how adept people have become at avoiding interruptive or “push” marketing. This is no different on the internet – we use spam filters and popup blockers, and get hijacked only when we’re tricked into giving away our username/password. So be careful who you give your information too – especially third party applications – a simple google search will usually give you some insight as to the validity of the app.

At the risk of sounding naive, maybe if we all get just a bit more cautious, we’ll be able to shut these phishers out.

Tags: Safety, Scams, Security, Social Media, Twitter