You may have noticed a warning page when clicking a link to a non-MySpace website. There is nothing to be alarmed about. The warning does not mean the website is unsafe. The warning is simply there to tell you that you are indeed clicking a link that is taking you to a new website, not another page on MySpace. We hope this will prevent you from typing your email & password into a fake MySpace login page (a phishing page).
Displaying this warning is something I wanted to try as an experiment to see how much it could reduce phishing (and thus Spam). We turned it on briefly last week for a test and it seemed to work, so I'm going to leave it on for awhile. If you haven't seen it yet, the warning looks like this:
Right now we've whitelisted the most popular sites people click on (such as RockYou, Slide, YouTube). We know these sites are not hosting Phishing pages, so we don't need to show you the warning page. We will gradually add more & more sites to the whitelist so you won't be bothered as much.
To learn more about phishing, read the blog I posted last week.
UPDATE: This measure has greatly reduced phishing on the site, so we're going to leave it on by default. However, we have now made the exit warning box optional. If you don't like seeing it, and you're sure you can tell a phishing page from the real myspace login page, click the checkbox to hide the exit warning, and you'll never see it again.
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Don’t Look Away
By Kate Voegele
Release date: 22 January, 2008 |
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