Twitter phishing attack spreads via Direct Messages
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Filed Under: Featured, Social networks, Spam
Twitter users are reporting receiving direct messages (DMs) from other members of the network, cheekily asking if it is them who is pictured in a photo, video or mentioned in a blog post.
Various versions of the dangerous messages include:
is this you in the video?
is this you in this picture?
check this out... it's a funny blog post. you're mentioned in it.
Clicking on the link attached to the message can take you to what appears, at first glance, to be the Twitter login page.
But take a closer look, and you'll see that the website isn't the real twitter.com:
If you make the mistake of entering your username and password on the page, in the hope of seeing the picture or video or blog post about you, then you could be handing your login credentials to cybercriminals. They could then use the information to spread scams further across the network, spam out malicious links or use the passwords against other websites where you might use the same login details.
Del Harvey, who runs Twitter's Safety team, says that Twitter is resetting the passwords of users who it believes have been hit by the phishing attack.
@delbius
Del HarveyWe're resetting passwords for affected users; here's the help page to check out about what you should do. support.twitter.com/articles/31796…If you use the same password in multiple places, it only takes one password to be stolen for fraudsters to be able to gain access to your other accounts and steal information for financial gain.
It's also important that you don't use a word from the dictionary as your password. It's easy to understand why computer users pick dictionary words as they're much easier to remember, but as I explain in this video a good trick is to pick a sentence and just use the first letter of every word to make up your password.
(Enjoy this video? You can check out more on the SophosLabs YouTube channel and subscribe if you like)
Password security is becoming more important than ever. Make sure that you're taking the issue seriously, or suffer the consequences.
Follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up-to-speed with the latest threats, and learn how to protect yourself.
About the author
Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. In both 2009 and 2010, the readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which is very cool. His awards cabinet bulging, he was voted "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can contact Graham at gc@sophos.com, or for daily updates follow him on Twitter at @gcluley.
Saturday 9 July 2011
Twitter phishing attack spreads via Direct Messages | Naked Security
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