Tumblr has exploded in popularity recently, but along with success comes a big, fat target on its back. Spammers have taken to the service to avoid Facebook filters and redirect users to phony YouTube pages.
The main reason the service has seen such a rise in growth (450 million page views a month!) is that users are catching on to the very flexible and forgiving nature of the rapidly gaining social networking site's publishing tools.
Whereas most blogging sites look down upon posts with little or no written content (the big search engines may not even index articles with less than 150 words, unless the content is from a big media outlet) Tumblr basically doesn't care how short or long the content is. And the search engines seem to love it.
Most users take advantage of the easy controls in the publishing suite to post high-quality photos with a seemingly infinite range of resolution and a wide array of display options, from thumbnail to poster-board. It's like scrapbooking on steroids.
But recently more users are taking advantage of the easy video posting technology, and the site is being touted as the first serious challenger to YouTube's dominance in that market.
But there's a dark side to all this success.
Along with ease of use comes an army of spammers and scammers trading in on the Tumblrname recognition to lure Facebook users into clicking links which land on some very "phishy" pages.
The most recent example is the phony YouTube post which promises to show Italian TV newswoman Marika Fruscio as she has a "nip-slip" on live TV. But clicking on the Facebook news feed item redirects users to fairly sophisticated pages looking for subscribers to online survey scams or ringtone come-ons. Most surfers don't catch the knock-off "YonTube" logo, which, at first glance, looks legitimate.
Clicking these ads has resulted in uncountable numbers of people being scammed out of personal info like email addresses and cell phone numbers. Or worse.
The lesson? User beware. Security pros advise never clicking on Facebook "news" items that don't come from people in your network, and especially any come-ons promising to show innocent wardrobe malfunctions.
No matter how foreign, hot or exotic...
The main reason the service has seen such a rise in growth (450 million page views a month!) is that users are catching on to the very flexible and forgiving nature of the rapidly gaining social networking site's publishing tools.
Whereas most blogging sites look down upon posts with little or no written content (the big search engines may not even index articles with less than 150 words, unless the content is from a big media outlet) Tumblr basically doesn't care how short or long the content is. And the search engines seem to love it.
Most users take advantage of the easy controls in the publishing suite to post high-quality photos with a seemingly infinite range of resolution and a wide array of display options, from thumbnail to poster-board. It's like scrapbooking on steroids.
But recently more users are taking advantage of the easy video posting technology, and the site is being touted as the first serious challenger to YouTube's dominance in that market.
Along with ease of use comes an army of spammers and scammers trading in on the Tumblrname recognition to lure Facebook users into clicking links which land on some very "phishy" pages.
The most recent example is the phony YouTube post which promises to show Italian TV newswoman Marika Fruscio as she has a "nip-slip" on live TV. But clicking on the Facebook news feed item redirects users to fairly sophisticated pages looking for subscribers to online survey scams or ringtone come-ons. Most surfers don't catch the knock-off "YonTube" logo, which, at first glance, looks legitimate.
Clicking these ads has resulted in uncountable numbers of people being scammed out of personal info like email addresses and cell phone numbers. Or worse.
The lesson? User beware. Security pros advise never clicking on Facebook "news" items that don't come from people in your network, and especially any come-ons promising to show innocent wardrobe malfunctions.
No matter how foreign, hot or exotic...
