So I came across a news article for the general audience (i.e. non-technical people) on phishing attacks. This isn't the first of them but I finally decided to blog about the media and the misdirection caused by them. The article is titled "Facebook 'ideal' for phishing attacks: researcher". While the article highlights well known issues and the dangers of falling victim to phishing attacks, it specifically targeted Facebook and social networking sites.
Pretty much everyone in the technical community will tell you that any site can be a target for this. In fact, any company that sends out emails with links (i.e. enter Amazon here...) are prone to this. Because users have become accustomed to this behavior, hackers can take advantage of these boiler plate templates and provide links that direct to their own sites, which appear like the trusted organizations. And voila, a phishing attack is in the works...
It's interesting to see that the media only writes about social networking sites as opposed to online shops or worse yet, online banks. For most, protecting their online banking is higher on the priority list. Then, why only target social networks? To its credit, the article did mention the words "financial institutions" in the last sentence of that entire article. Unfortunately, the media only chooses to focus about hot or controversial topics. So riding on all the press and interest on social networking, they decide to continue exploring an avenue that works for them.
In this particular case, you may know better than to fall into the media's trap because of your technical background. But you have to wonder..How often do you get sucked into believing the media on things outside your area of expertise? Whether it may be real estate or the latest health trends... In this example, as opposed to giving false information, the media attempts to have the public focus on a very narrow aspect of the problem when the issue at hand spreads throughout the net.
Hence, people turn to wikis, blogs and more open arenas for information and opinions. Although the argument against that has always been that only a specific percentage of the population or specific character types will contribute to these open avenues. But that story/controversy is reserved for another blog entry...=)