How To Prevent Being Scammed On The Internet

Just now I received word that someone is spreading a phishing scam on Twitter. You can read all the specifics about the Twitter Phishing Scam on Chris Pirillo‘s blog, where I first read about it.  Also, be sure to use OpenDNS in order to protect yourself from phishing scams, as they have excellent phishing protection.

Anyways, this has got me up and thinking.  Just about anyone can create a website or application that logs someone into Twitter using the Twitter API.  However the creator can just as easily use his/her application or website to steal someone’s login information, without the user knowing what went on at all.  What can be done about this?  I’ll explain my solution.

First off, 3rd-party applications that ask for a user’s login information to a service should be open source.  If an application is open source, then anyone can look at the program’s code and verify that that application is safe for all to use.  In contrast, if an application isn’t open source, every person who hasn’t seen the code is left out in the dark.  Second, you the user should never download from any site unless it is the official site of a service or the source code for the program is also available to download.  This means that you should be careful when downloading from mirrors and to check URLs to be sure you aren’t being redirected to another site.  For example, you go to a site that has a popular Twitter client available to download.  You see they also have a source link available, so you figure it’s alright to download it.  This is where you can mess up.  A scammer can easily write a copy-cat program and put it on his website, while the link to the source code is actually linking to the real application’s website.

Truthfully, there will always be scammers and the users of the Internet will never be 100% safe, so it’s best for you to stay alert and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.  That’s all I have to say, so be careful out there.  We’re crawling on one big web.