Twitter Spam Goes to the Next Level
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Saturday, January 3, 2009
If you have a Twitter account, you may want to consider changing your password. It's been getting nasty over the last couple of days. Let's see if I can recap:
First, a new service started up that promised to send @ messages straight to your inbox. Problem was, the service asked you to "support" them with your first tweet. It sent out a message from your account saying what a neat service it was. The web page didn't say what "support" meant. Of course, there were tons of these messages flooding Twitter as word of this service picked up. Before the day was out, the domain owner had resold the domain for $1200.
Damn, I'm in the wrong business.
Later in the day I got a notification that someone was following me on Twitter. I went to check the profile to find a single post to the effect that "Bob" (username obscured for obvious reasons) thought I should visit this great site. Of course, it was a get rich quick scheme. Ugh.
Today I got a Direct Message (DM) purportedly from one of my contacts on Twitter stating that someone had written a very funny blog post about me. Yeah, right. It was at a Blogger account. I clicked, and it redirected me to a phishing site. Of course, I didn't provide any info, but I did poke around and found a phising page for Facebook logins.
Here's the thing: If you EVER, EVER get a message with a link and the link asks you to log in, close the browser window, open a new one, and go directly to the web site. If you're asked to log in, do so. You'll probably find a copy of the message waiting for your somewhere it was a legit message.
The Twitter issue from today was doubly frustrating. After I reported the spam in the usual manner yesterday, they sent me an automated message requesting that I follow their spam account and then send an @ message to them to report spam. So I did today, and got admonished for reporting a malware link. WTF? I let them have it.
Karen thought I was joking in my Weekend Assignment entry yesterday, but I'm getting very tired of all the Twitter spam crap. I suppose that's the downside of having an open API, but I also say that if they want to build a decent community they ahve to figure out how to nip this stuff in the bud. Yes, Twitter is free, but this is the kind of thing that can kill them - and their funding.
Update: Damn. I just changed my twitter password and found another
piece of spam: "This may help!" with three URLs. All spammy. Damn.The person picked up on a keyword in a tweet from yesterday.
Tags: Twitter, Spam
Filed under: Twitter Spam
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