If my hunch is correct, most of us reading TIG have MySpace profiles. I know TIG has had one for ages, with over 7,000 friends. The site is a great resource for bands, but it's also a huge pain in the ass — if we get one more "$500 Macys Card" spam message I might hurl. We've seen countless band and friend profiles get hacked by "phishers" and send out these dumb — though seemingly pretty harmless — spam messages and comments. Delete, and move on, right?

Not in this case. R&B singer Alicia Keys had her account hacked in a far more insidious way, and visitors to her profile who clicked about were redirected to a Chinese website that attempted to install malicious code on their machines.

From the article:

MySpace identified the problem last Thursday and within 24 hours had scrubbed Keys' page of all bogus links, according to MySpace's chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam.

"Her profile was phished," says Nigam, "which means that whoever is managing her site probably input their user name and password where they shouldn't have," possibly by responding to a scam email, which would have enabled the hackers to install false links on the diva's page. The clean-up happened just in time for the Nov. 13 release of her new album, As I Am, but Keys' wasn't the only MySpace page that got hacked: Some two dozen other bands appear to have suffered the same security breach, including the indie groups Jet King, Wee Red Bar and Seagull Strange in the United Kingdom, according to the blog VitalSecurity.org.

The bolding is mine — does it make it sound like the MySpace security officer is blaming the victim? Does to me, especially knowing just how many of our imaginary friends have had accounts hacked.

What about you? Has your Myspace profile been hacked? Do you even have a MySpace profile these days, or have you jumped ship to Facebook… or another, better social networking site? Do tell.