Scary stuff... Worm hits myspace.com
myspace has been banned on my personal network for a long time, as have equivalent sites, thanks to the inherent dangers to internet innocents.
I remember a few years ago I was sitting next to my daughter while she was at http://www.totalgirl.com.au/. Right in front of my eyes my daughter received a message that said "I want to f**k you, 24/7".
Nobody does that to my daughter.
My response to the message? "This is *****'s Mom... I will hunt you down, you {{censored}}." Did I scare my correspondent? I sincerely hope so.. I hope he or she needed a change of underwear right there and then. I hope he or she fainted from fright every time the phone rang, there was a knock at the door or an email arrived from a stranger for months afterwards. If he or she had to double their standby stock of underpants, even better. If the message was from a 12 year old thinking he or she was being funny, then I hope they learned one hell of a valuable lesson.
Sadly, it was not until I told those behind totalgirl that I was going to report the abuse to various child protection agencies that they deigned to respond to my emails, at which time they said the guilty member had been banned. Big deal. Hang, draw and quarter him or her is what I say. Give the IP address and a log of member's activities to the police and let the police get whoever it is off the street. Account banning does no good at all. They re-register under a different name, they using open proxies to change their IP address, they have multiple ISP accounts (or if their ISP uses dynamic IP it can be well nigh impossible to block a pervert).
Anyway, as the article says, "this attack [against myspace] was just a step away from something much more serious, in large part because of the social network's rising popularity"
http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=34955