Phishing Scam Hits Twitter; Will it Become the Next MySpace?

Posted by Admin on January 7th, 2009 at 04:41am

This morning, I received a direct message from one of my Twitter friends. It was a very strange message. Check it out:

I clicked on the link, which lead to this:

I checked the Tweet stream of the friend who sent me the direct message. She said she had been fooled into following a phishing scam.

She wasn’t the only one. Originally, the blogspot page directed people to another site which looked like the Twitter homepage. They signed in, giving away their user name and password. Of course, this helps spread the phishing scam via direct messages.

What really happened is that a mockup of the Twitter homepage was hanging out at a very bad URL. The good folks at Twitter captured this screenshot of the site:

These phishing scams hit MySpace pretty hard once it got popular. Now, it looks like we have to watch out for them on Twitter.

Phishing schemes kind of took the shine off the once popular MySpace. Looking back, I think it’s one of the reasons I stopped hanging out on the social network. I saw so many messages that weren’t from my friends even though it looked as though they were. I haven’t noticed the same on LinkedIn or Facebook yet.

If phishing hits Twitter consistently, then it might just be their demise.

What do you think? Did you get an unusual direct message? Think phishing could ruin Twitter? Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!

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Read More…

[Source: Search Engine Watch Blog]

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