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January 21, 2009 | 10:45 AM

Using Your Information Against You

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace reveal a lot of information about you.  For your friends, that’s a good way to keep in touch with each other.  For others, that’s a good source of details they can try to use against you.  Everybody has received scam or phishing emails by now, but enterprising folks have begun to mine data from social networking sites to use in these scams, as shown in this TechCrunch link

It always helps to be wary of those kinds of requests, but there are some ways to make it harder to get scammed by this type of situation:

  1. Limit the amount of personal information you put online.  Only reveal what you want and nothing more.
  2. Watch how you are contacted.  If a friend normally wouldn’t ask for money over instant messenger, such a request should be suspicious.
  3. Give your friend a call and make sure their profile hasn’t been hacked.

There’s a lot more of you on the Internet than you realize, but a little common sense will help keep you safe.

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Comments (4)

  1. Posted by Jeff February 17th, 2009 2:32 AM EST

    I have always had reservations about TMI (too much information) people put on the their social network pages. With as many scammers trolling the networks it’s not a question if you are going to ripped off, it’s when are you going to a victim.

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  2. Posted by 4ndyman February 19th, 2009 11:58 AM EST

    I always view online personal profiles as a place to be creative. If people are idiotic enough to think that I’m going to jump on the possibility of taking in millions from a Nigerian diplomat for only a couple hundred dollars, then they’re probably idiotic enough to think that I really did get my Masters degree at the Sorbonne studying Pantomimickry with Marcel Marceau.

    I remember a story of someone who was fed up with snail-mail spam and wanted to know who was selling his information. Whenever he signed up for something — a magazine subscription, a raffle, whatever — he’d spell his name a different way, and he’d keep track of which spelling went to which source. When the spam started rolling in, he could tell who had sold his info by how the name was spelled. It might be a little more difficult online, but it shouldn’t be impossible.

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  3. Posted by Frank Paolino February 20th, 2009 9:49 AM EST

    I agree, it is a problem. Phishers are mining these relationships (it is very easy to do) to send very targeted emails that look like they come from a friend. Nigerian scams are childsplay compared to these, which are much harder to spot. Read more about Trust and Social Networks: The New Frontier of Phishing: http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf/d6plinks/FPAO-7MKJL2

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