Big surprise: Spammers find their way into Apple’s Ping social network

Now that we’re little more than a day from the launch of Apple’s social network, Ping, reports are coming in that spammers are beginning to target the service — surprising no one.

The biggest scam right now appears to be an offer for free iPhones that is popping up on many high-profile Ping accounts, reports MacRumors. Even though Apple has said that it has 160 million iTunes accounts tied to credit cards, you can also easily create an account without one — which opens the doors for spammers to flood the service.

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Before Ping, there wasn’t much harm that a spam account could do on iTunes. But now that it has a prominent social element, spammers will quickly become an eyesore.

The security software company Sophos weighed in on the issue in a blog post. “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,” writes Sophos’s Chester Wisniewski. “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 will surely respond to the influx of spam in due time. But it’s surprising that a company so focused on user experience couldn’t see this coming, or have minions on hand to clean up spam from popular accounts.

via The Guardian