The popular site Twitter has been experiencing a tremendous amount of phishing attacks that stole the usernames and passwords of site users. Many of these accounts were prominent Twitter accounts. Fox News’ account declared for about an hour that “Bill O’Reilly is gay” while Barack Obama’s account, which was last used in November on election day, posted a long link to a third-party survey with the lure of a gas card prize.
Rick Sanchez, a CNN anchor and frequent Twitterer, was declaring earlier he was “high on crack and might not be coming into work today.” Britney Spears account, started in October to promote her new single and upcoming tour, took a sharp turn from cheerful updates about eating Pinkberry frozen yogurt and relaxing with family to a poorly-punctuated attack on her nether region. Aw, hackers, just leave Britney alone!
Facebook’s Twitter account is also among the hacked, with a link to porn at “http://yougetlaid.info” that was just removed.
It doesn’t appear these hacked accounts are related to the phishing scam of the weekend, as ReadWriteWeb points out, since the phishing works through direct messages that send e-mail notifications to the user that run along the lines of “check out this funny blog about you!” The message includes a link to a site that looks exactly like the Twitter homepage. Once the unassuming user clicks on the link and logs in to the masquerading page, the hackers obtain the user’s log-in information and can take over an account.
According to Twitter many of the offending messages that are known as tweets have been removed.
Twitter also suffered a second large-scale scam yesterday when users began receiving direct messages telling them how to win a free iPhone — by signing up for a $5-a-month text messaging service.
Did Hacker Croll do this? I read before the hacker can gain to administrator page on twitter.com.
Thank you.
cenary,
Twitter is well aware and has taken measures to combat this phishing scam.