MySpace in China – When Malware Worlds Collide

It would seem MySpace is looking at the possibility of expanding to China, while at the same time Chinese websites are experiencing a significant amount of traffic in malware comment-spam. It seems to me, unless MySpace gets significantly more involved in making sure the possibility of the XSS vulnerabilities that were used by previous malware are covered, this could be a recipe for disaster. This is a potentially huge source of revenue for the people at News Corp, but also for adware affiliates and malware distributors.

But really, MySpace isn’t the only one that needs to take note of this. It’s really time for Web 2.0 to have a paradigm shift.
These websites were started by individuals, and intentionally left to be developed and made great by its user base. They’re all highly customizable, letting you include an incredible amount of your own content. On the one hand this is a brilliant idea, and has made the internet a much more compelling “place”. (Or is that “tube”?) On the other hand, no one gave much thought to security as these places were being built up. The news has been liberally littered lately, with stories about various user-driven sites being used to distribute malware.

Without this change of direction, it could be that within a couple years these sites may become functionally unusable – they’ll be crushed by the very thing that made them revolutionary.

I, for one, hope this does not come to pass.