Tentacles of Phishing reach Twitter too
Photo by: Mykl Roventine
Till now, Twitter was deemed to be outside the scamming range of phishing scams. That record was broken last week.
A number of Twitter accounts were either hacked or were waylaid by a common phishing scam. Users like President-elect Barack Obama, pop star Britney Spears and CNN’s Rick Sanchez woke up one fine morning to find their Twitter accounts hacked.
Many more fell prey to a phishing scam that broke into their accounts pretending to be communication from their Twitter pals.
The communication came in the form of a direct message, those that Twitter users often send to one another. It informed recipients someone had posted interesting things about them online. In some instances, their photographs were also mentioned as featured alongside.
It then asked them to click on a link to view the reports.
People clicking on the link were taken to a site closely resembling Twitters official login page. A close look at the URL would have revealed that the link directs to a site other than Twitter.
Login information submitted here by unsuspecting users were taken down by scammers and used to steal their identity and of others in their networks. One of the URL that was being used in this manner was twitter.access-logins.com.
The scam put at risk any information victims kept in their accounts. It also did a similar thing to their friends by sending the same message to them from the compromised account.
Preliminary findings put the scam to be the handiwork of fraudsters based in China.
Source: Twitter.com
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January 11th, 2009 at 12:33 am
[...] Tentacles of Phishing reach Twitter too [...]