MySpace power outage adds to growing problems

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 25 July 2006 08:04

Your IT - Home IT

When you become the tall poppy in the field, everyone tries to cut you down to size. It seems the prestige of being perceived by many as the number one website in the US comes attached with certain unavoidable baggage that goes with fame for social networking site MySpace.

First there were the calls led by a US Senator to ban MySpace from schools and libraries.

Then, in a seemingly unfortunate vindication of some of the concerns raised about the social networking site, a cyber predator assaulted a teenaged victim that was contacted online through MySpace.

That tragic incident forced MySpace to re-evaluate and re-develop its security procedures.

Adding to the woes of MySpace last week was the revelation that one of the banner advertisements on the site contained a Trojan Horse that could download spyware, adware and other malware to unsuspecting users of the Internet Explorer browser.

It was estimated by security firm iDefense who discovered the errant ad that more than one million computers around the world, who had unpatched versions of the browser used by more than 80% of web surfers, had been infected by the ad.

To this day, a satisfactory explanation has not been given as to how a malware laden banner managed to slip through the defences of MySpace and get served to its pages.

The misfortunes of MySpace have continued with the news that the site was hit by a massive power outage that took it off the air for nearly 12 hours last Sunday and Monday.

The explanation given was that the heatwave currently afflicting California crippled the State's power stations in areas where the site locates its servers.

However, sceptics have questioned why a site of the magnitude of MySpace could not have switched over to back-up and mirror sites in the event of server outages.

Some have postulated that MySpace does not have the necessary scale to cope with the enormous increase in traffic in recent months.

It seems that there are two things that MySpace desperately needs at this point in time, strong leadership and a clever PR company.