Twitter “Croaks.” Gone Phishing!

Last week, I had to apologize to Miss Universe. Twice. I hate it when that happens.

You see, she had taken exception to a couple of DM tweets that I had sent her, inviting her to check out an LOL video that “made my day,” and daring her to beat my IQ score. Frankly, I feel pretty confident that I could have held my own on the IQ score. The trouble was, I didn’t send either tweet. Nor did I taunt her with, “Did you know you were in this video?” Or offer to hook her up with Viagra at dirt cheap prices. At least, not on purpose.

Somebody hacked my Twitter account. What a mess! Multiple DMs (Direct Messages) had been sent to virtually every one of the hundreds of people who are “following” me. Bummer. Actually, Miss Universe was pretty nice about it. Others, not so much. I got some fairly nasty “croaks” from people I’d never even heard of. I just this minute invented the term “croak” because the whole word “tweet” has a kind of a nice, fun, upbeat sound to it. And there was nothing nice about some people’s reactions.

I felt real bad about it. At first I was just plain confused; then it became clear what had happened. I was the victim of phishing and I felt violated. Using my account, some hacker dropped a virus in my cookies (goodness, that sounds downright unsanitary) and sent out messages to everyone in my database.

Here’s the deal: social networking sites are tripping all over themselves to embed powerful features that most subscribers will never use, such as digital image or media files with the ability to download content from third-party Web sites. These features are not the kind of worms or viruses that shut your computer down. They just send out messages using your own friend list, or something similar. 99% of them are harmless advertising spam that result from wandering around in YoVille on your Facebook. (Hey, you gave them permission when you adopted your first cow.) But a moderately-proficient hacker can use the features to phish your network with files that, when opened, transfer the virus through that person’s network, and so on, and so on…

Mostly, the public doesn’t hear about nobodies, like me, who get phished. We just change our password, run a virus protection scan, clean out cookies in the browser, and a write a lot of apologies to people like Miss Universe. But I did some research and discovered that having your Twitter account hacked is not nearly as rare as you might have hoped. (Actually, Twitter tries never to use the word “hacked,” preferring instead to speak of having your account “compromised.” Sounds nicer, I guess.)

My research turned up 10 large-scale “compromisings” so far in 2009, covering thousands of accounts. Some of these include high-profile folks such as President-Elect Barack Obama (in January, before the swearing-in), Britney Spears (3 times in 2009), and the official feed for Fox News. Yikes. My personal favorite took place in mid-July, when a hacker broke into the online accounts of various Twitter staffers, including Twitter CEO Evan Williams’ email account. How embarrassing! The attack exposed all sorts of internal documents which were distributed widely and gleefully reprinted by the French website Korben.

As unique as I like to think of myself, my own experience targeted about 750 people, including New York Jets Wide Receiver David Clowney. I only hope that I’m not going to have to apologize to him as well.

Did I bring this upon myself? Well, maybe partly. It turns out that I’m not the only one who can’t retain anything but water these days. The systems are designed as they are because huge numbers of us with college degrees and reasonable IQs are unable to remember a single four-digit PIN number without “hints,” let alone a unique password for every application for which we ever sign up. The result is that 41% of internet users unwisely use the same username and password for numerous internet services, including online banking accounts. Couple this with apps like Ping.fm, which automatically triggers your message to your profile on FaceBook, hiF, MySpace, Plaxo Pulse, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga simultaneously, hooking them together like an ecosystem – when one account is “compromised,” the others are likely to tumble like dominoes.

Would I do something as stupid as this? Well…. not any more. Additionally, giving the user an option to guess the name of a pet in lieu of actually knowing a password has just dramatically shortened the odds for an attacker. Does the fact that I had three dogs as a kid, each one named Skippy, show continuing sentimentality on my part or an incredible lack of childhood imagination? You choose. Would I actually stoop to using “Skippy” as my password, let alone my “hint?” Well…..not any more.

There are some things that we simply can’t control. The kinds of DDoS attacks that occurred on August 6th managed to slow both Twitter and Facebook to a standstill by using a network of computers (dubbed zombies) to flood the server with requests for data until the server overloads and comes crashing down. No amount of firewalls on our end can protect us from this, but I so loved the security experts’ analogy of likening a DDoS attack to 15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time, that I just couldn’t resist working it into this post. Sorry.

I discovered two other interesting miscellaneous pieces of information in my research: The first is that there are Hacker Conventions. Lots of them. All over the globe. The world’s largest annual hacker convention is called DEF CON and it’s held in Las Vegas. Of course it is!! Federal law enforcement agents from the FBI, DoD and other agencies regularly infiltrate DEF CON but they just can’t keep pace with a couple of 18-year-olds with too much time on their hands.

The final remarkable thing is that this past April, University of Wisconsin doctoral student Adam Wilson, by wearing a cap outfitted with electrodes that monitored changes in his brain activity, managed to tweet 23 characters just by thinking. Yup, by focusing on the letters, he spelled out “USING EEG TO SEND TWEET,” among other messages.

You know what this means, don’t you? It will only be a matter of time before some dweeb in a party hat will be able to stand across the room from me at a cocktail party and tweet spam into my head; words that will, no doubt, come rolling uncontrollably out my mouth like a gumball dispenser.

With my luck, I’ll be chatting with Miss Universe at the time. I could just croak!

When Immediate Gratification Isn’t Fast Enough

Email, Facebook, Twitter, Tweets, LinkedIn, Texting, Skye, PDAs, wiki, blogs, Ryze, Tribes.net, Jabber, IRC, etc. The hottest topic in business these days is the importance of leveraging social networks as a business tool. It seems imperative that we join groups and communicate RIGHT NOW!!! I can’t help but wonder, is this really a good thing?

True story: I was editing a job at a video house in Los Angeles a few years ago, and I took a minute to run down the hall to the bathroom. Three minutes tops, I swear. When I got back to the editing suite, I discovered that a Hollywood producer had called my cell phone and was livid when I didn’t answer. Not annoyed - livid! I immediately returned his call and got an earful. “I went to the john. Did you really expect me to take my phone into the stall?” I joked. Yes, he did. I believe that his exact words were, “Your bodily functions shouldn’t be an inconvenience to me.”

Now admitedly, this was Hollywood, where everyone has an inflated opinion of the value of their self-worth. But still…..

My husband and I have a friend, several friends actually, who upon failing to reach one of our cell phones immediately calls the other to ask, “Where is Kay/Brad?” My mother used to do this constantly, hunting me down like a bloodhound on an escaped convict. When did it get to be my responsibility to be available to everyone 24/7?

I understand the concept of social networking. I’m trying to embrace it – really I am. But it’s getting to be a fulltime job.

E-mail is bizarre; even with my spam filter, I get about 60 to 70 emails a day. Those are divided fairly evenly between

1. opportunities to get a Ph.D. using only my “life experience,”

2. notifications of terrible deaths of government officials in Nigeria who have inexplicably left $6,000,000 of absolutely legal money and desperately need to run it through my bank account and, finally,

3. friends who send me jokes, YouTube clips, photos of cats, links to newspaper articles and, very rarely but occasionally, some actual information of interest.

I have a question: Does getting a link to a YouTube clip constitute legitimate social networking? Even if it is that really amazing clip of Chris Bliss juggling to a Beatles medley? I doubt it.

Facebook is an actual social network although it’s awfully time-consuming and I’m not sure just how it’s going to help me further my career.

I still don’t get Twitter. Although I actually do tweet from time to time, but I’ve never learned a single interesting piece of newsworthy information from a tweet and I’m beginning to think it’s a complete waste of time (please don’t tell Aston Kucher, though). And if you’ve got a PDA, you can text your tweet to Twitter. Furthermore, my friend Kathy Kamauu (who is an expert in this stuff) assures me that I can automatically update my LinkedIn status every time I post a tweet in Twitter via a Ping.fm account. Because it’s terribly important to revise my user timeline faster! Faster, faster, faster….

Why? And at what cost?

Lots of employers will now only accept a resume via email. Remember when you agonized over which paper stock would make your resume stand out from the crowd? Forget that now. You have lost control over how your resume will look or how their particular printer will format the pages.

A few years ago I was between gigs and already had a big trip to France planned and paid for so, on a lark, I applied for a temporary month-long telemarketing job. I scored well in the written materials but during my face-to-face interview, right out of the gate the guy asked me, “Quick, what is your worst fault?” I paused for a moment because, frankly, I have an array of crappy attributes from which to choose and I was trying to decide which was my most despicable. After exactly five seconds (he was keeping track) he told me, “Never mind, you already failed the test. You can leave.”

“Gee, what just happened? I wanted to give you an absolutely truthful answer.”

“We don’t want a truthful answer,” he explained. “We want a fast answer. If they have even five seconds to think, they might realize that buying a timeshare on Kauai is probably not a practical thing to do. We don’t want ever want you to stop to think because it allows them to think, and thinking isn’t good for business.”

In other words, thinking is a bad thing. Speed is a good thing today typing w/out capitals or punctuation is faster UR seeing the future of tomorrows business letters LOL