Apple’s Ping, the new social networking tool for music in iTunes, has opened a new opportunity for the spammers!!! Ping has been launched last Wednesday only, and it is hardly a week old. But Spammers are prompt enough to use the platform.
The users have already been flooded with the spams offering some free iPhone or online survey scams. However Ping is a social network introduced by Apple in iTunes where you can build up your network to share musical tracks, discuss and comment on the tracks shared among the network. You can also suggest the tunes to your friends.
Ping has been reported to be well accepted by the users in iTunes immediately and spammers has not wasted time to take the full advantage.
Survey scams are already endemic on Facebook over the last few months. The absence of filtering on Ping has given the spammers a new & friendly platform. Sophos, a net security firm, has warned of a potential net security risk which may be resulted due to this lack of monitoring in Ping.
Chester Wisniewski of Sophos has written, “Most of the security industry has been pointing out the migration of spam from an email-only venture to blog/forum comments, Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms.” “But apparently Apple didn’t consider this when designing Ping, as the service implements no spam or URL filtering. It is no big shock that less than 24 hours after launch, Ping is drowning in scams and spams,” he adds.
Apple has anticipated a certain level of mischief, which is reflected from the approval process of uploaded profile pictures. It filters inappropriate photos, but can’t stop the spamming. However the iPhone developers are hopeful to have a better and strict monitoring to stop malicious contents. Till then we can only suggest the users to be cautious in opening messages from unknown users, especially about the suspiciously generous deals & offers.
