Blog Focus On The Twitter Phishing Scam
Blog Focus is Technorati's daily roundup of the top stories as told by the bloggers of the world. Each day five posts, no matter how popular or nascent, will be selected by editors to portray a general unscientific reaction to discussion points around the 'Net.
Maybe this Blog Focus should have included the words “yet another” as in yet another Twitter phishing scam? They seem plentiful these days, bots and scammers trying to invoke their mostly annoying and occasionally damaging wrath across the twittersphere. Such is the price to pay, one supposes, for partaking of the free and ever more popular service. But it does bring up sticky questions about the ability of Twitter – and other popular social media/social networking communities – to successfully police nefarious forces amidst the masses who are finding ever more clever ways to interact and communicate with one another.
Some takeaways and reaction from the blogospheric realm:
• The Huffington Post: Many people on Twitter say they've been sent Direct Messages (DMs) or Tweets that include a generic message encouraging the recipient to click on a link, along with a URL. Some of the messages that have been received have read "You're on this vid!", "hah, i think i seen u on here," "wow. you look different on here," or "rofl this you?", each one followed by a link to a site that begins with the URL "http://videos".
• Matt Singley: Another day, another phishing or malware scam on Twitter. It seems like these are happening entirely too often, and the reason is that people continue to ignore common sense. Very, very rarely will a site hijack an account of some type without getting input from the account holder.
• Dave Delaney: Always judge a person by their avatar and username. Typically if the avatar is an attractive female (or their anatomy) and the username is a scramble of letters and numbers they should be blocked and marked as spam.
• Jeff Harbert: The point is simple: Be paranoid about your online accounts, and never trust unexpected emails about your accounts.
• Mashable: Per usual, the best way to avoid this scam is to avoid visiting the link, and to not provide your Twitter username and password on sites that look suspicious (most apps should be using OAuth at this point anyhow). And if you believe you’ve been duped, be sure to change your password immediately.
Follow Technorati