I have been encouraging lawyers to use Facebook as both a true pleasure outlet, and a means of leveraging their friends and family to get the word out about their law practices.
Several months ago I got a few emails from people whom I am friends with on Facebook. They emails all had links to what promised to be videos, and the titles of the emails contained enticing messages such as:
- I can't believe you did this on video
- Did you see the goofy video of yourself?
- This was not like you.
The emails didn't make sense, and they were sent by both really close friends, and a couple of people I went to high school with and haven't seen in 18 years. Thankfully, I didn't open any of them and contacted the people whom the emails came from to warn them that they had a virus.
This morning I got a newsletter from Legal Technology expert Kenneth von Hoph warning about potential social media viruses. According to von Hoph, it isn't just Facebook either.
I use a Mac almost exclusively these days for everything but my direct law practice related business. I also am pretty lucky that I didn't open those emails on my Windows based system, or else I would have also sent the emails unwittingly (friend, please let me know if you ever get a suspicious email from me).
The moral of the story is to be very careful with Social Media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Tagged.com, LinkedIn and others.
In this lawyer's opinion, the greatest danger to Internet security now comes from Twitter. While I have seen no evidence thus far that Twitter is susceptible to or infected with a virus, it is the prefect target. Think about it, between my close to 1000 followers and followees on Twitter (@danieljaffe) I get thousands of Tweets a day. Mostly, if they appear to be interesting, I click on the link. Since most of the links are reduced using tinyrul.com or other url shrinking services, it is impossible to see where the link really goes until you click on it.
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