This came up at our discussion at ISSA on Thursday so I thought I’d mention it. Gizmodo published a great article about the problems with passwords. Couldn’t agree more. They mention tools like 1Password which is a great app that stores passwords and gives people a shot at creating complex passwords. I hope we’ll start to see better options for authentication at home. If you know of some other tools, let us know.
There’s a great writeup on the Bobijou phishing scam over at Purple Car.
About a month ago my daughter asked if she could sign up for facebook. A couple of her friends had just done it and she wanted to be a part of the fun. My reaction surprised me; I didn’t immediately say no. That took whole hours. I started investigating it, looking at it as a parent first. Of course the first message I sent was to Dave, asking for his opinion. What follows are some observations and a lot more questions.
The first issue I discovered was that facebook has a policy that requires you to be over the age of 13 to use the service. (My daughter is…not 13) Of course kids lie and sign up with or without consent of their parents. I began to realize that dealing with facebook with a kid is a tough problem:
Beyond Facebook, some of the sites I looked at:
Webkinz (web site that accompanies the stuffed animals)
Togetherville (Most promising site in my opinion, links to Facebook for parents)
(I also looked at Kidswirl and Whyville and several others but wasn’t impressed.)
Other resources:
The Online Mom is a great website with a lot of articles that cover opinions on a wide range of ages.
This is still a work in progress and we’re interested in your thoughts. How would you recommend approaching this issue? What additional sites are you looking at for kids and what online resources have been helpful?
This scam popped up on Facebook this week. I saw it on my profile this morning. The scam looks harmless enough. A friend of yours has posted what appears to be a video of a laughing baby on your Facebook Wall. Clicking the link will trigger most modern browsers to throw up a phishing site warning.
Do not click on this link! Simply delete the post. Your friend is not a spammer. Their account was likely highjacked. Be a good friend. Tell them their account has been highjacked and encourage them to change their password, log out and back in under the new password.
TIP: Many of these scams originate in Eastern Europe and English is not their first language, hence the poor grammar and occasional misspellings.
According to CNET, criminals are using fake LinkedIn invite email to scam people into clicking links that lead to the Zeus botnet. The scam targets Windows users only and may be the first time the Zeus botnet has targeted LinkedIn users.
According to CNET, “Researchers saw tens of billions of messages related to the attack yesterday, Henry Stern, a senior security researcher at Cisco Systems, told CNET. “There have been some bursts today, but nothing like yesterday,” he said. “The botnet responsible for this is still in operation and it’s just doing something else right now.”
Fake LinkedIn email links to the Zeus botnet.
