hey folks -
Have you ever received a bulletin or comment from your friend that you know they did not really send to you? It's probably because they got "phished" and a spammer is using their account to spam you! You may have been phished yourself and seen messages, comments or bulletins sent from your account.
Phishing is a trick people use to steal your email & password. It is not a "security" flaw, and you're not getting "hacked."
It's entirely preventable by you, if you know what to look for. You've probably been warned by your online bank about phishing websites, but most people don't think or worry about phishing when using their MySpace account. You may wonder why anyone would even want to get your MySpace password. On MySpace, phishers obviously aren't after your money, but they are still trying to make money! They do this by logging into your account and using your account to spam your friends. They make money from the advertisements they spam. (Spam works better when it comes from a real account, because your friends are likely to pay attention to it!)
To make sure you don't get phished, you have to understand exactly how it works. Here's the basic idea: It starts with the person trying to phish you making a webpage that looks just like the login page of the website you're trying to use. (In this case, MySpace.) Then the phisher comes up with a creative way to get you to click on the link to that page (maybe by sending you a message or comment saying you should check something out). When you see the link and click it, you are presented with the fake login page created by the phisher. If you enter your info, you've been "phished" - you've fallen for the trick, and they've captured your email and password! The phisher will then start logging in as you until you change your password and lock them out.
Now you may think you know exactly what the MySpace login page looks like and that someone could not trick you into typing your info into a fake page, but believe me, it is very easy to fall for this! It's also very easy for anyone to make an exact copy of the MySpace login page, or the login page of
any website you use.
There is only
one easy way to know that you are at the real login page. That's by looking at your browser's address bar--the place you view or type in the URL of the website you want to visit. By looking there, you'll know what website you are actually on at the moment. For MySpace, the
only page you should login to is "myspace.com" - with no extra characters before or after it. If the url you saw was "profile.myspace.com" that's fake (someone used a myspace profile to make a fake login page). If it was "myspace.com.index.cfm.sowa.cn" that's fake (someone created a fake webpage with myspace in the title to make it look like it was real). If it is "rnyspace.com"
that is fake. (Look closely that is the letter "r" and the letter "n" combined to look like an "M"! Here's a few visual examples:
example 1 example 2example 3 This all may sound complicated, but there's a simple way to make sure you NEVER get phished. If you are ever clicking around MySpace and you are asked to login, don't do it! STOP. Go to the URL bar in your browser, and type in 'myspace.com' and then login. If you always type in myspace.com yourself, you'll be sure that you are on our real login page, and not some fake designed to steal your login credentials. And, again, if you think your account is phished right now, just change your password. That locks the phisher out, simple as that. As a general precaution, it's good to change your password once every month or so.
4:44 AM
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