Myspace Lacks Security Against Cybervandalism

MySpace is one of the popular social networking sites in the web, is faced with constant security problems that pressures to spoil several of its innovative features which makes the website useful.

 Many of the group sites in MySpace were turned into a cyber-graffiti wall that is filled with offensive photographs and comments. MySpace group sites are dedicated to different interest like beer brewing, home, movies, gay right issues and animal rights. This was done by spammers, Internet malcontents and hackers.

 The people responsible for the act are called the trolls, who are fond of creating a mess and trying to one-up one another using vicious vandalism. Aside from that they upload insulting videos on YouTube, daring one another on creating real-world threats.

 MySpace users are having a hard time to maintain order in the site. They claim that MySpace is not doing anything or are lax regarding the repeated attacks that persist repeatedly in spite constant efforts to communicate with MySpace administrators. MySpace said that they added security and they are doing their best to control the situation, they would not want to be interviewed for this story.

 A MySpace user running a group for craft-beer enthusiasts, Corey Scott-Walton, for the last to years, he notified MySpace regarding the problems existing on the site and has also suggested solutions but he was only sent a thank you mail and nothing was done about it. He just one of the many MySpace users who was fed-up and decided to create tools to fend-off the abuse caused by trolls.

 It was said that there was a bug which allows vandals to place a comment on group sites even though they are not a member of the group. A moderator should first approve a member to join a group before he can post comments on a group site.

 The bug results to another problem referred to as “bombing” where a numerous number of blank comments are inserted in forums or group discussions and this is done by using an automated tool. What happens is that the blank comments push the other comments down creating empty comments on the forum. “Pinning” is another problem where a certain topic from discussion thread can be pinned anywhere or on other forums.

 Even though the vandal’s account has been deleted which results to the deletion of almost half of the offending comments, there are still no comments to be seen rather just pages of blank spaces. Scott was able to code a program in Visual Basic named “Thread Cleaning” for moderators to delete offensive comments.

 The terms of service by MySpace indicates that users are not allowed to use automated scripts and tools but they have no choice but to take action on their own.

 Another MySpace user, a web developer based in Connecticut also developed a tool that checks his group after every 20 seconds for any spam and removes it. He did not want to be identified to avoid harassment but he stated that he made use of the report abuse feature many times. He also stated that the more users report an abusive account the faster MySpace gets rid it of it.

 Even if the accounts used by trolls are deleted they simply create another account and continue harassing other users.

 Another moderator in charge of a group that has to do with religion also came up with a tool to “unpin” unpleasant topics. He said that he had periodic contact with administrators of MySpace but all was empty promises. And he felt like they were not taking any actions to solve the problem. The hackers were also able to delete his other accounts. He decided not to include family members and friends on his site for the fear of harassment outside MySpace.