YouTube invaded?

“Spammers will always use a variety of attacks that take advantage of undetected vulnerabilities.”

This is a news article entitled YouTube a hit with spammers, published on 18, October 2007. It was about a security expert, Sophos Plc found that spammers are exploiting YouTube to promote products online. In the news article, spammers are using YouTube's invite-friend feature to send out unsolicited mail. The spam will hide under the YouTube message which allows the spam to avoid the spam filters or antivirus programs operated by Internet service provider. For the review of the actual article, click here.

Email is the most effective tool to send out message in the society now. It is one of the best invention I would say. There are million of emails sending out everyday and almost all of the internet users have their own email account, some of them have more than one. Checking and sending emails have become one of the daily tasks of everyone.

There are many viruses created for different purposes. Antivirus programs are a lot in the market as well to protect internet users but it viruses still come in everywhere. According to Walsh (2006), in order to link our own purpose in using the particular text, we need to identify the social purpose of the particular text and its cultural context. This can be linked to the reason why people will click on the spam mail. YouTube is a popular video sharing website. Some unfortunate pc users will just click on it with no doubt because they see the word, YouTube in the spam mail. They believe that the mail is actually secured because of YouTube.

So, the question is, to click? Or not to click?



References:

The Star Online
[Online, Accessed on 29 October 2007]
URL: http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2007/10/18/technology/19154123&sec=technology

Walsh, M 2006, ‘”Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.