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March 28, 2005
Yahoo users targeted by FUD
Sometimes I worry about the state of tech marketing and its hand maiden, tech journalism. Some reporters have no common sense, and/or vendors play them like a flute.
Consider the reports last week that phishing scam artists were targeting users of Yahoo's instant messaging system. This bit of "news" was generated by an opportunistic security vendor named Akonix, which announced that it had detected the "first phishing attack over IM," which attempted to steal Yahoo user accounts.
Some reporters, apparently suffering from a slow news week, jumped at the pre-fabricated story. "The first phishing attack carried out via instant messaging" blared TechWeb News. InternetNews said the "new" attack appeared to be limited to Yahoo's network, and quoted someone from Akonix who erroneously made this pronouncement: "In instant messaging, because it has been a relatively safe medium, people are less vigilant." EWeek pronounced that the scam was evidence that "phishing attacks are spreading far beyond e-mail inboxes."
Conveniently, Akonix sells a product to protect corporate IM systems against such attacks.
But the fact is, IM-based phishing attacks are over a decade old. Scam artists have been targeting AOL instant messaging users with fraudulent messages from "AOL billing" since the dawn of that service.
Nor was last week the first time anyone has tried to phish account details from Yahoo IM users. A little googling produced several earlier complaints of scammers trying to separate Yahoo Messenger users from their account information. (Here's one report from last October.)
Bottom line: Beware of phishing attacks. But also beware of technology companies trying to frighten you into giving up your financial information through FUD.
Posted by brian at March 28, 2005 10:12 AM
Comments
The state of "tech news" journalism these days is appalling. It is increasingly the case that company press releases sent to journalists are trotted out verbatim all over the place without any kind of verification or questioning. It's a dangerous state of affairs.
Here's a spam-related example that I just found via google news:
href=http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://www.e-promag.com/eparchive/index.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3Dviewarticle%26webID%3D1000%26newsID%3D5001%26issueID%3D5124%26articleID%3D50617
The story is about a new piece of software developed by IBM to deal with spam. There are four stories which cover IBM's Press Release:
Stories found via Google News
Out of these four stories, only one article bothers to question the usefulness of this software by seeking commentary from sources other than IBM themselves!
The other three articles all march to the IBM tune (the journalist who wrote the LinuxWorld.com article even claimed that the software "Tosses Spam Back at Spammers", a claim subsequently denied by IBM in another article dedicated only to their side of the story).
This is just a minor example of the kind of blind idiocy out there which passes for "journalism". The example in this blog entry is even better.
Posted by: anon at March 29, 2005 4:14 AM
This point is well taken. If you watch Akonix they are very opportunistic with their marketing. I remeber when Star Wars came out earlier this year, the next day they had a press release saying they were protecting users from viruses by blocking corporate downloading of infected bootlegs. What is funny is tha Akonix was previously dating service turned security company, you would think they would be focused on credibility rather than grabbing the cheap headlines.
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.com/public/article.php/10817_899341
Posted by: SJR at December 13, 2005 11:01 PM
