Twitter has given the world the ability to spread the latest breaking news, hot gossip, and whatever else tickles the fancy of over 200-million [overly] active users all in real-time. It used to take hours – even days – for news to travel; now word can spread like wildfire in a matter of minutes.Unfortunately, that leaves the door wide open for internet scammers [and spammers] to pump out malicious links and malware in phishing attacks just as fast. Let alone just as easily.
One of the more popular phishing attack scams that seem to be reaching across all social networks is the one where you receive a message from a friend [or person you’re following] saying that they’ve found some picture, video, or article about you that just sent them into a fit of laughter.
A variant of this infamous phishing attack scam always seeming to make rounds was directly messaged to Hyphenet's Twitter account just yesterday:
For curiosity’s sake, if you do click the link, a message from Twitter will popup, warning you that the link has been marked unsafe and should not be followed.We didn’t bother going past that point, as clearly it’s not in the best interest of our computer’s security – and neither should you if you ever see this page.
Glad to see Twitter is taking precautions to protect their Twits [no pun intended].
In the future, if you receive a mention or DM similar to the one above, go ahead and delete it without following the link, even if it comes from a company Twitter account. The DM that was sent to us was coming from a business' Twitter profile, which we believe had been compromised and we un-followed shortly thereafter.
UPDATE: Apparently spammers are now pumping out tweets geared around video games like Bioshock Infinite, so be on the lookout for those spam-infested tweets as well.
Happy Tweeting!
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