Apple Spruces Up Ping Social Net

It didn’t take long for Apple’s Ping social music network to catch on with iTunes fans. One week after its inclusion in the refreshed digital media store update, it garnered more than 1 million users and a bunch of annoying spam links and messages.

As eSecurity Planet reports, Apple quickly jumped on the spam scourge this week and also tweaked the site with “back” and “forward” buttons for better navigation.

Just one week after its debut, Ping now joins the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as social networking sites that have and will continue to be targeted by hackers and spammers looking to take advantage of users’ misguided trust in social networks and their eagerness to share information quickly among their friends, family and colleagues.

Ping, the social network built into its updated iTunes 10 digital media store which eclipsed the 1 million-user mark within a couple days of its release, received a thorough scrubbing by Apple engineers this week after discovering that its comments section had quickly and predictably become a spammer’s paradise.

A bevy of comments and links on various artists’ pages were inundated with links to bogus surveys promising free iPhones or iPads in exchange for completing the questionnaires. Instead, they were just spreading more spam and malware to unsuspecting victims’ PCs and mobile devices.

“We’ve seen these types of ‘win a free iPad or iPhone’ scams hitting Facebook and Twitter for some time now as it fits the modus operandi of cybercriminals to latch on to the latest technologies or platforms that users will use to spread their spam or scams,” Bradley Anstis, vice president of technology strategy for security software provider M86 Security, said in an advisory.

Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Apple Hustles to Rid Ping of Spam