Apple's bug ridden Mobile Me is proving a gift for phishers, according to security experts.

Dan Clements, vice president at Affinion, the company that owns Card Cops, said that it has found the names of lots of .Mac users on a trading site used by the Internet underground. In one case a third of 300 profiles found in one phishing file were .Mac customers.

They were netted from a realistic looking scam that snared some sophisticated victims too. The way that Apple had set up some of its Iphone structures were a gift for phishers. One included a link to help set up a desktop, PC, Iphone, or Ipod Touch. Another claimed that Apple was 'unable to process your most recent payment,' and to 'please update your billing information today' so your service is not interrupted. While many PC users have seen such scams and are used to them, Apple users are famously stupid enough to believe that they are immune to such hacks.

Mobile Me makes a good hacking target because it lets customers synchronize mail, calendars, contacts, photos, Safari bookmarks, Dashboard widgets, and more among Macs, the Iphone, and Ipod Touch. Since Mobile Me had so many glitches in the first few weeks of operation, Apple users were used to seeing error messages like those the phishers created and so were easy marks for the scam Clements said that Apple needed to do more to warn users to be careful of phishing attacks. X

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