[perfume]

Dear Twitters and FaceBookers,
DOS( Denial Of Service) attacks have almost crippled the two popular social sites, but the site admin's are putting up a brave face! Read on from this BBC article : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8188201.stm

Those using the sites 'may" face the risk of having their personal data getting into the hackers hands! Kindly be "EXTRA" careful! Thank you!

[stormfish]

I wonder why they left myspace alone?

[perfume]

Dear stormfish,
I was reading the BBC article and found that President Obama's site was also hacked (Facebook OR Twitter, don't remember!). These folks want attention and heaven knows their ultimate motives, but on the surface it is Sadism, with a capital "S"! They target the sites with the most members and since i don't socialize much and am not a member of these or the myspace sites, cant comment on the numbers or members of your site!

I remember a quote of the legendary novelist, P.G.Wodehouse" one half of the world does not know how the other half lives"!

[stormfish]

Thanks for the link.

[perfume]

This is a follow-up development to what i originally posted as a hacker attack on Twitter and Face book! Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8189162.stm

Now, the scale of the attack and the reason behind it are slowly coming out!

Google, You tube, Twitter, Face book,G-mail, Live Journal are a few of the sites ,we now know have been under fire!

All this for one motive : suppressing the voice of a single individual, MR.CYXYMU, a pro-Georgian liberal who uses his Blog site to good effect. In an attempt to throttle the blog of Cyxymu, DOS attacks on all these sites were a pre-planned and a well coordinated effort!

lotuseclat79 has posted about DOS(Denial Of Service)!

[Cookiegal]

perfume,

I've merged both threads together as there was no reason to start a new thread to elaborate on the other one.

[perfume]

Dear cookiegal,
Thank you. That's fine by me!

[lotuseclat79]

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter.

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

-- Tom

[montreyj]

Also beware of hackers compromising your friends on Facebook or Twitter accounts and sending messages with links in them. One of my friends on Facebook had someone hack his account. The hacker posted a link on my friend's page and made it look like it was from one of his friends. When he clicked on the link, it opened a new window with the Facebook login screen to retype his username and password in. It made it look like he was logged out of his account, but it just opened a new window asking for his Facebook login information. When he typed in his information and pressed enter to login, the screen popped up said he had the wrong username and password. And it repeatedly going back to the login failure screen even though he was typing in his correct username and password. Once the hacker compromised his account information, they posted links on some of his friends pages, including mine, with a false link that would open a new window and ask for the same information. This just happened last week

[perfume]

"The hacker posted a link on my friend's page and made it look like it was from one of his friends. When he clicked on the link"

The above quote, i culled from montrejy's post. The lesson is never click on any link without verifying with Dr.web link scanner. Right-click on the link and select Dr.Web and let it scan the website!

[Gizzy]

Originally Posted by montreyj

Also beware of hackers compromising your friends on Facebook or Twitter accounts and sending messages with links in them. One of my friends on Facebook had someone hack his account. The hacker posted a link on my friend's page and made it look like it was from one of his friends. When he clicked on the link, it opened a new window with the Facebook login screen to retype his username and password in. It made it look like he was logged out of his account, but it just opened a new window asking for his Facebook login information. When he typed in his information and pressed enter to login, the screen popped up said he had the wrong username and password. And it repeatedly going back to the login failure screen even though he was typing in his correct username and password. Once the hacker compromised his account information, they posted links on some of his friends pages, including mine, with a false link that would open a new window and ask for the same information. This just happened last week

While it could be beneficial to scan urls you're unsure of like perfume said it most likely wouldn't help with this kind of problem,

That sounds like a phishing link, the easiest way to protect against that is to always look at the url of the site before you enter your username/password and make sure you're on the right website.

For example with facebook make sure the url in the address bar is http://www.facebook.com/ and not something else like http://www.focebook.com/ or http://facebook.badlink.com/

More info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

[perfume]

Dear Gizzy,
Thanks for the eye-opener article! I am quoting from the article posted by Gizzy Kindly read this: quote" Nearly all legitimate e-mail messages from companies to their customers contain an item of information that is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, for example PayPal, always address their customers by their user name in e-mails , so if an e-mail addresses the recipient in a generic fashion ("Dear PayPal customer") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing.[59] E-mails from banks and credit card companies often include partial account numbers. However, recent research[60] has shown that the public do not typically distinguish between the first few digits and the last few digits of an account number—a significant problem since the first few digits are often the same for all clients of a financial institution. People can be trained to have their suspicion aroused if the message does not contain any specific personal information." unquote

[Jason08]

I don't really use those sites, but thanks anyway for the head's up.

[perfume]

Dear Jason08,
Hello there! You don't use pay pal? Now you have raised a very important point, which is more secure (in purely relative terms) Credit cards Or Pay pal?

[Jason08]

No, I don't use Paypal.