Friday, August 12, 2011

A solution to "Twitter Spam" starts with you

You're probably seeing this message because someone said your twitter account is sending out direct message spam and they asked you to visit this page to see what to do.

Recently a new type of Twitter Spam has started where you'll receive a message like
- Found you in this funny picture lol. i2h.de/b0tb
- LMAO did you see this funny twitter update? i2h.de/b0ta
- Did you really say this about me? one of your followers sent me this tinyurl.com/42j44cw

The problem is that all these links are to a fake Twitter "phishing" site. It looks like Twitter so you enter in your name and password and it then forwards you to the real twitter page so you didnt notice anything particularly wrong.....

However what then happens in a few days is your twitter account will start sending out direct messages to your friends with more of these fake messages.......which they then click and the cycle continues......

So what can you do about it;

1/ Check your outbound direct messages
2/ Revoke access to any applications you dont recognise (account-settings-applications)
2/ Change your password (account-settings-password)

This way the spammers will no longer be able to send out spam messages using your username and password and your account wont be used to capture friends user names and passwords......

Cheers,
Dean

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