Viral Porn Trojan Horses
OK, so the provocative title was a sellout, but it's a real topic -- stay with me. One of my favorite entrepreneurs (and good friend), Scot Wingo, has a great post at eBay Strategies describing a recent shooting-fish-in-an-eBay-barrel phishing scheme.
The exact way their doing it and ways to avoid are covered. Put simply, it looks like Phishers latch onto a trusted Seller ID, draw traffic with porn and search games, and harvest unsuspecting buyer IDs (and PayPal accounts) with some spoofing javascript. The scam then multiplies virally from there. I won't even try to cover the details here, but if you buy as much stuff from eBay as I do it's worth reviewing. It's a thorough post.
As a longer-term plug, if you're playing around auctions as a buyer/seller/investor I highly recommend sucking Scot's brain, er, feed. I backed him at AuctionRover (sold to Overture before he spun out ChannelAdvisor) and he's been thinking about the auction channel as long as anyone. At the cycles he clocks, that's a lot of thinking...
The exact way their doing it and ways to avoid are covered. Put simply, it looks like Phishers latch onto a trusted Seller ID, draw traffic with porn and search games, and harvest unsuspecting buyer IDs (and PayPal accounts) with some spoofing javascript. The scam then multiplies virally from there. I won't even try to cover the details here, but if you buy as much stuff from eBay as I do it's worth reviewing. It's a thorough post.
As a longer-term plug, if you're playing around auctions as a buyer/seller/investor I highly recommend sucking Scot's brain, er, feed. I backed him at AuctionRover (sold to Overture before he spun out ChannelAdvisor) and he's been thinking about the auction channel as long as anyone. At the cycles he clocks, that's a lot of thinking...
Posted by VC Dan | 8/21/2006
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