A worrying security hole...

[elfs]

For the past few weeks, Omaha and I have been getting spam from a "fan driven music social networking site" that shall remain nameless. The spam was sent under Yamaraashi-chan's name, and claimed to be from her. Following the links provided, however, sent us to a lot of unsolicited commercial endeavors.

Mighty annoying, so I emailed their customer service and said that I was receiving UCE from them under the guise of "my minor daughter's account."

They shut down the account immediately, and we'll see if that successfully ends the deluge of spam. But it worries me that they just took my word for it; there's no real similarity or identity relationship between my account and Yamaraashi-chan's gmail account. They just shut it down on my word.

On the one hand, I'm glad they did. This was a legitimate complaint. But I can imagine how easy it would be to make life difficult for someone by writing illegitimate complaints.

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Not really a hole - after all if you HADN'T been legitimate she can contact them and state she wanted immediate reactivation.

[wookie-cd.livejournal.com]

Did you check the message headers? Following the transmission chain back could allow you to determine whether your response was correctly targeted.

[elbowfetish.livejournal.com]

For extra credit, try spurious DMCA takedown requests. Guilty until proven innocent is the way those go.

Worse still, you can have someone removed from Google (and similar) and they effectively cease to exist on the Web. It can take them a while to notice, and if they do they have little recourse.

It's not just on the Internet either. Phone up a bank sometime...