Listening to Mark Pesce on RNZ... talking about yet another propruetary 'free' service (& those poor folks using it) exploited by ne'erdowells... that's now affecting 60million folks. Here's the thing: if you're taking advantage of a 'free' (of cost) proprietary service, the provider of that service owes you nothing. They might see it as perfectly reasonable to take advantage of you in interesting ways. What's more, they might be bad at security, enabling a *3rd party* to exploit you.
People need to stop wringing their hands as these situations keep happening, and realise that there's *a pattern here*. This is systemic. People who use these services should *assume they'll eventually be exploited* (whether by the supplier of that service, or someone who's exploited that service's naive security practices). Duh. If you want to avoid this problem... stop using these services. It's pretty straightforward.