Thing #12: Panoptifun

One of the things I cover in my tutorials on shopping online is how to go about protecting your privacy, and crucially, your login information, particularly on sites that store financial information such as paypal. Well, so I felt really silly when I got phished on myspace. I received an email notification of a myspace friend request. I've had a few of those before. The notification includes a link you can use to go directly to the add request section of your myspace account. Unless you know for absolute certain the add request is valid, do not ever open that link! I made the mistake of doing it. There were no hints I'd made a mistake because I was taken to what looked like the add request section of my account. Of course those are easy to mirror and where I had arrived in fact was at the dummy page created by the phisher who at that same moment had logged my myspace login and password information. I found that out when a few days later I got a 'whaa?' email from a friend wondering what the heck I was doing typing on their wall, 'check this!' and the 'this' was a link to lonelyhoustonhousewives.com. I got off easy with some mild embarrassment. Lesson: don't use email links to visit sites you're a member of! I notice that facebook (and probably myspace as well) includes exactly this caution in emails sent via facebook that contain URL's.