Buzz My Blog documents my personal adventure into the world of Internet Marketing and Making Money Online. The original intent was to provide an honest and personal account of my real-life experience starting a blog from scratch and growing it into a successful and profitable web site. I did not want to create another one of those Get Rick Quick sites or annoying blogs that pushes this product or that product just to make a couple bucks. Instead, my goal was to provide an informative and interesting discussion of what works and what doesn’t, sharing every detail along the way. Readers could follow along, contribute comments and suggestions, and learn as I learn, ways to improve and eventually profit from their blog.

In less than a month, I have learned quite a bit about what it takes to build a successful blog. Buzz My Blog has grown quickly and has seen a good number of visitors – some who actually return regularly. It is emerging as an informative and collaborative online community where fellow bloggers can learn and discuss ways to make their blog more successful. I have met a number of other bloggers that share a similar interest in the topic and we learn from each other (along with our readers). Most importantly, I have learned that it is, in fact, possible to make money from your blog. However, unlike the potential scams that end up in your Junk Mail folder every day, it cannot be done with little effort. It takes hard work, dedication, persistence, and a commitment to provide relevant and interesting content on a frequent basis. This is not an easy thing to do.

Do you have a blog? If so, I invite you to come along and join me on this journey. Buzz My Blog has barely earned more than a few cents so far, but I am on my way. Surprisingly, I am finding the journey just as rewarding as the ultimate destination. Sure, I hope it makes some good money eventually. And if it does, you’ll know exactly how!

Remember the associate of that deposed dictator who needed your help transferring a few million dollars from a Swiss bank account? Well, he’s back. And he—or one of his ilk—may show up soon posing as your “friend” on Facebook.

Someone bearing an eerie resemblance to those ubiquitous perpetrators of so-called Nigerian scams ended up in the online social network of Australian citizen Karina Wells. Earlier this month Wells received a message on Facebook from someone she thought was her real-life friend Adrian. He wrote that he was stranded in Lagos, Nigeria, had no access to a phone, and needed Wells to wire $500 for a plane ticket home. “Adrian” even pleaded for help in a real-time conversation over Facebook’s chat service.

Wells didn’t buy it. She alerted Australian authorities and Facebook, each of which is conducting an investigation. Although the details have yet to be confirmed, Facebook officials believe someone obtained Adrian’s log-in credentials through a “phishing” scheme, luring him to a dummy site where he was asked to enter his Facebook password. The incident was initially reported by the Sydney Morning Herald and later confirmed by BusinessWeek.com.

Wells thwarted the apparent ruse, but officials and security experts warn such scams may become more common in an online world where millions of people interact daily, often sharing intimate details with widening circles of friends.

“Implied Trust”

While e-mail is still the most common online method used by scam artists to contact potential victims, fraudsters are increasingly turning to Web pages, a category that includes social networks, according to the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. Last year the total amount of money reported lost through Internet crime in the U.S. rose 21%, to a record $239 million, according to those agencies. The victim was contacted through a Web page in 32.7% of those cases, up from 16.5% in 2005. Social networks are partly to blame for the increase, officials say. “There is an implied sense of trust, and there’s not the sense that we can be physically harmed,” says Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Investigations division.

Social networks are also more ubiquitous, Henry notes. “Many [criminals] have now moved to computer networks because that’s where the victims have moved and, therefore, the opportunities.” According to comScore (SCOR), the number of unique visitors to all social networking sites worldwide reached 689 million in October, up 35% from a year earlier.

It’s not difficult for a savvy Web surfer to impersonate someone else in cyberspace, as a high-profile cyber-bullying trial now under way plans to show. On Nov. 18 jury selection began in a federal court in Los Angeles for the case of Lori Drew, who prosecutors say passed herself off as a teenage boy in a widely publicized case of impersonation on a social networking site. Two years ago 13-year-old Megan Meier hanged herself after receiving messages from “Josh,” an older boy she had befriended on News Corp.-owned (NWS) MySpace, who allegedly later told her that the world “would be better off” without her. According to prosecutors, an investigation ultimately revealed that “Josh” was a fictitious online persona of multiple people, including Lori Drew, the mother of one of Meier’s teenage rivals. Drew now faces one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing computers without authorization.

Fooling Security Experts

A pair of online security industry consultants carried out an experiment recently to demonstrate just how easy it is to masquerade as someone else on LinkedIn. Shawn Moyer of FishNet Security and Nathan Hamiel of Idea Information Security got permission from a friend to set up a phony profile page on the networking site aimed at professionals. Together, they posed as Marcus Ranum, a consultant renowned for building the first e-mail server for whitehouse.gov and who now serves as chief of security for Tenable Network Security. Moyer and Hamiel used Ranum’s name, résumé, and photo (all of which they found on the Web without any help). Moyer and Hamiel then set about seeking to connect with chief security officers and chief information officers of large companies, an editor-in-chief of a security trade magazine, defense industry professionals, and other people whom Ranum might know in real life.

Between 1348-49, England was besieged by an invader that took no prisoners, killing all in its path, be they young children, women, or the old. This accursed marauder was responsible for the deaths of almost 70% of England’s population, some estimates placing that figure at around 5 million people.

The enemy wasn’t a race of people, but a species of bacterium called Yersinia pestis, otherwise known as Black Death. Theories vary, but one concerns a benign origin for Yersinia pestis, in countries with warmer climates and people wearing less clothing. Here, transmission is as simple as skin-to-skin contact. However, in the more temperate north, we wear more clothes, which reduces direct skin contact. A new approach is required. And to be sure of infecting the host, the bacteria had to be more potent.

Does this all sound familiar? Of course it does. Humans are ingenious, but for the most part, we merely ape what Mother Nature has since perfected; a biological arms race.

In our world, such examples can be found in advertising: whereby advertisers have to find newer and more innovative ways of reaching the ever-increasing disinterested masses; and the battle between computer virus writers and anti-virus software developers.

From disease to direct message

Only recently, Twitter was the subject of a social scam that involved one person’s profile being compromised, which then sent out a direct message to their followers, encouraging them to click on a link, taking them to a website, asking them to enter their username & password .. and so on and so forth.

These scams can be, predictably, rather successful. However, because Twitter is a social network populated with plenty of tech’ savvy people, the message got around even more quickly and the whole thing died off.

This begs a very important question: what if this social scam had started on MySpace? Where the savviness of your average member is a degree or two lower.

What we do know is, social scams have traction, because certain tricks will always work. But because people are now able to react quickly, the amount of time these scammers have to hit pay dirt is substantially less.

As luck (or should I say, bad luck) would have it, Google’s Gmail service encountered serious problems earlier today, which sent ripples of displeasure and frustration throughout the world. However, one man’s misfortune is often another man’s gain. In this case, while Google dealt with their Gmail outage, someone created a Google Group for porno:

“… someone hacked the created a Google Groups page on Gmail (link NSFW) at the worst possible time, adding images that leave nothing to the imagination as well links to adult content elsewhere on the net on top of the page … this is not an official Google group but a user-generated one most likely deliberately set up now to take advantage of the fact Google has other things on its mind right now than checking up and moderating new groups on the subject of Gmail.”

This is opportunism at its very best. With every Gmail user in a blind panic, many would have gone in search of an update on Google. So what’s the most common search term likely to be? “Gmail down”, which happened to be the title of our porn-infested Google Group. Genius.

The evolution of the social exploit

The next logical step is for someone to emulate the Twitter scam, but sending out links to websites full of advertising. Doing this on a large enough scale would reap serious rewards, within the short time before word got out.

But let’s step a little further into the future, to a point where the amount of time the scammers have available to them is even shorter. Here’s where they need to make money faster. The benign infection must now work harder and become more virulent and possibly more harmful.

We already have many thousands of PCs that are infected, acting as invisible armies, armed and ready to attack servers anywhere in the world. So the stage is certainly set and all the players are in place.

If the means to prevent a social scam is our ability to communicate the source and nature of the attack via our social network, might these standing armies of “zombie” PCs be used to attack and then compromise the social network itself, controlling the ebb & flow of the very information we’re using to disrupt the attack?

Who knows. But what we also know is, as quickly as the diseased social scammers score their success, the collective host will react with equal or greater force to repel the next attack…