According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name!

The mega popular Facebook site has joined the ranks of social networking sites that trick you into providing your password so that they can steal your AOL , Yahoo, MSN, or other address book, and spam all of your contacts. Only this time it’s with a twist – they are actually spamming your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) contacts in your Buddy List! The spam starts out like this: “According to his Facebook status, Friend’s Name (their username) is now “Friend’s Nickname”. Friend invites you to join Facebook and keep up with what he and your other friends are doing.” What we want to know is WHY are AOL, Yahoo, and MSN continuing to let this go on?

There are any number of reasons that you may want to know how to export email addresses from your email program on your Mac. Whether using Apple mail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or some other program, here is how to extract the email addresses of your contacts and correspondents from your mailing program on your Mac – just make sure that you are doing it for the right reasons.

Does the title of this article on Quechup and spam sound familiar? It should, and it’s no accident. Substitute Flixster for Quechup, and you’ll find that we had to write the exact same article about Flixster earlier this year. So if you get spam from Quechup saying that someone “has invited you as a friend on Quechup.. the social networking platform sweeping the globe”, well, don’t blame that someone, blame Quechup.

People Data Lab (PDL), a data “enrichment” company, boasts that they have data on 1.5 billion people, almost certainly including you. That data, stored on an Elasticsearch server, was all breached in November.

Well, look what the spam cat just dragged in – address book importing spam from Bebo.com. Why is it that these various social networking and other sites seem to simply consider the incidental spam attendant to address book importing (if they think about it at all) to be the cost of doing business – and, mind you, a cost sent COD to the people receiving the spam – when in fact it’s really an occupational hazard?

According to Linked-In, “frolleagues” – people who are business colleagues that beg a friend-style social networking connection from you, are increasingly becoming a threat to one’s professional standing.