MySpace Is Said to Draw Subpoena in Hoax Case
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The subpoena is in connection with the suicide of a 13-year-old Missouri girl after she received cruel messages from people posing as a teenage boy on the site.
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By Laura Petrecca  The conventional wisdom is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But in the digital age, that's often not the case for high-profile professionals being targeted on MySpace.com.
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Under mounting public pressure, MySpace.com had little choice but to hand over to state authorities information on registered sex offenders who might cruise the Internet to lure unsuspecting youngsters.  But more remains to be done to protect the vulnerable from online predators.
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By David Ovalle, The Miami Herald  Mar. 5--Hey, MySpace users: Miami-Dade police want to be your friend.   The county's largest police department has created its own page on the social networking site Myspace.com.
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It's beauty versus geek when a man convicted of hacking into LexisNexis last year allegedly hijacks the MySpace account of an 18-year-old Los Angeles woman with a popular streaming video show. When the hacker allegedly demands nude photos and phone, he gets returned to the pokey instead.
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More than 140 sex offenders  convicted in New Jersey had profiles on the networking Web site  MySpace, the state&#39;s attorney general said on Tuesday.
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Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users&#39; personal details.Facebook alleges that in June servers controlled by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook&#39;s site. The allegations are contained in an amended lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.The company first filed suit back in June, but amended the complaint this month after obtaining court orders to identify who controlled the servers trying to access its site.Experts have warned people against publishing too much personal information on social networking sites for fear it could be collected and then abused by fraudsters.Facebook, one of the most-used social networking sites after MySpace, said the automated scripts caused error messages to be generated, but the company did not say if user information was successfully collected.Named in the suit is Istra Holdings, which controls SlickCash.com, an affiliate advertising business that offers commissions to Web publishers for referring Internet surfers to its portfolio of adult sites.It also names Brian Fabian and Josh Raskin, both of whom the suit says work at Istra in Toronto, and Ming Wu of Markham, Ontario, as well as 14 other unidentified people.Facebook said the hacking attempts cost it at least US$5,000 to investigate. The company has requested a jury trial and is seeking to bar the defendants from accessing its computer systems in the future, in addition to damages.&#160;
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Authorities are searching for whoever posted a long list and description of supposed sexual encounters between dozens of high school students on the online networking site MySpace.com.
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The FTC's quest for spam stopping balls Analysis Anybody who says crime doesn't pay obviously hasn't talked to Sanford Wallace. In just six months' time, the prolific purveyor of spam and spyware engineered a scam on MySpace that netted at least $555,850, according to court documents filed this week.â¦
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By ANNE MARIE APOLLO  Two women were asked to resign from their jobs at the Clay County Clerk's office this week and three others were suspended three days, accused of spending too much time chatting it up on the popular social networking site MySpace.
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By Scott Rothschild, Journal-World, Lawrence, Kan.  May 27--TOPEKA -- Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison said a recent agreement with MySpace Web site to provide information on thousands of sex offenders is just one step in continuing efforts to monitor social networking on the Internet.
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MySpace.com, the top online teen  hangout, said on Tuesday it will bolster protection for minors  amid a flurry of complaints about sexual predators prowling the  site and a lawsuit filed on Monday by a teenage girl charging  it with negligent security practices.
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By Melody Mcdonald, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas  Jun. 17--FORT WORTH -- Tarrant County prosecutor Lori Varnell looked at the teen-age girl's MySpace page, and a red flag went up.
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Universal Music Group sues MySpace - claiming the site is encouraging users to illegally share copyrighted material.
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Two young New York men accused of trying to extort $150,000 from MySpace.com by developing code that tracked visitors pleaded no contest Monday to illegal computer access in a bargain with the prosecution.
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(InfoWorld) - Facebook's safety controls and procedures are deficient and fail to properly protect minors from adult sexual predators in the company's social-networking site, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo charged Monday. Cuomo's office has sent Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter detailing preliminary findings of an investigation into Facebook's safety measures and requesting via a subpoena a series of company documents. The subpoena calls for Facebook to submit complaints it has received regarding inappropriate solicitation of underage users and inappropriate content on the site as well as any responses generated by the company. Facebook also has to produce all of its policies "on user safety and all representations made to consumers about the safety of the site," the attorney general's office said in a statement. Early results of the ongoing investigation reveal that the description of Facebook's safety measures is far from reality. In recent weeks, investigators from Cuomo's office posing on the site as minors have been repeatedly solicited by adult predators. The investigators were also able to access a wide range of pornographic images and videos. To add insult to injury, Facebook either didn't respond or responded slowly to complaints from the investigators posing as either harrassed minors or their parents, according to Cuomo's office. Facebook reacted in similar ways to complaints about inappropriate images displayed on the site. Overall, Cuomo takes issue with Facebook's assertion that its social-networking site is safe and suggests that Facebook may be in violation of New York laws for misleading public statements and advertising. Facebook said in a statement that it takes the concerns of Cuomo's office "very seriously" and that it is committed to working closely with all state attorneys general on safety matters. "As our service continues to grow so does our responsibility to our users to empower them with the tools necessary to communicate efficiently and safely. We strive to uphold our high standards for privacy on Facebook and are constantly working on processes and technologies that will further improve safety and user control on the site," the company said. U.S. state attorneys general are turning up the heat on Facebook, MySpace, and online social networks in general, concerned that sexual predators are using these sites to stalk and victimize minors while site operators do little to prevent this from happening. In May, News Corp.'sÂ MySpace agreed to provide attorneys general offices in all U.S. states with information it has gathered on convicted sex offenders who have used its social networking site. The decision followed a tussle between MySpace and the AG offices, several of which had complained MySpace had resisted sharing sex offender data with them.
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There&#39;s now one more reason to be security-conscious while using MySpace.com: fake Microsoft updates.Using a hacked MySpace profile, online criminals are trying to trick victims into downloading a malicious Trojan Horse program by disguising it as a Microsoft update, according to researchers at security vendor McAfee.The attack is certainly not widespread -- McAfee has seen it used on only one MySpace profile -- but it does show how sites like MySpace can be abused by criminals.Web surfers are presented with what appears to be a popup window advising them to download the latest version of Microsoft&#39;s Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, which was just released this Tuesday. This software is distributed by Microsoft to help Windows users rid their systems of malware.In reality, the popup window is just part of a larger image that takes up most of the computer screen. If the user clicks anywhere on this image, his computer will then begin to download the Trojan program.The Trojan, known as TFactory, is a well-known piece of code that has been used by criminals for well over a year, according to Dave Marcus, a security research manager with McAfee.Hackers were able to launch this attack because they either discovered a flaw in the MySpace code or found a way of taking over user accounts, Marcus said. &quot;Our best guess is [the owner of the one MySpace profile] just got their password and user name phished,&quot; he said.Social networking sites allow their members to use an array of powerful Web programming tools that are increasingly coming under the scrutiny of hackers looking for ways to misuse them.In November, hackers found a way to serve up Web-based attack code from the MySpace profiles of Alicia Keys and a number of other musical artists.