During the Apple special event Apple launched their new social networking for music site called Ping and apparently already Ping is being inundated with spam messages and scams, with some attempting to get Ping users to complete pointless online surveys in return for a free iPhone.
According to an article over on The Register and by way of Sophos, Ping is built into the latest version of iTunes, iTunes 10 and enables the user to construct networks of followers and friends and post comments, something that the spammers have begun to exploit.
According to Sophos’ Chester Wisnieski, “Most of the security industry has been pointing out the migration of spam from an email-only venture to blog/forum comments, Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms. But apparently Apple didn’t consider this when designing Ping, as the service implements no spam or URL filtering. It is no big shock that less than 24 hours after launch, Ping is drowning in scams and spams.”
Apple looks to have foreseen a degree of problems as uploaded profile images only appear once approved, and no doubt will be filtering other content out over time and may just get on top of the spammers by performing a few tweaks to block them.