re: My annoyance at Social Networking sites

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Neil Schwartzman [mailto:neil () cauce org] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 10:27 PM
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] My annoyance at Social Networking sites

Dave Farber wrote:
> of course, giving someone your Yahoo login could be 
> DISASTROUS... if that person were untrustworthy (and if 
> they were trustworthy, IMHO, they wouldn't ask for it) 
> they could change your password and lock YOU out of your 
> account... disastrous indeed, if (say) you use that ID as 
> the owner of one or more Yahoogroups...!  They could take 
> over your owner/moderator rights, axe the groups you own, 
> retrieve and abuse the subscriber lists of those groups... 
> the list of damages possible is nearly endless.
>   


The consequences could be far worse than that! This is, after all, 
phishing in essence if not in practice.

Y! and Google and I expect others in the freemail space have 'wallet' 
functions with credit card information stored. There are now third-party 
services offering to find all of your friends on social-networking 
services, all you need to do is ... you guessed it, enter your freemail 
usename and password. A perfect vector for a huge security issues, MIM 
attacks and so on, should those take off too.

I expect someone will breach one of the social networks, and then go 
through the accounts of sign-ups from one of the giamt freemailers. 
Then, all queries for address-book mining coming from the social 
networking sites will be declined.

I've raised this issue with two of the major freemail sites, so far to 
no avail apparently. I expect it will take something really bad 
happening to prompt action on their part to disallow this stupidity.


-- 
==
Neil Schwartzman
Executive Director
CAUCE: The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial
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