Fake antivirus worm hits Twitter users

22 Jan 2011

1

A lot of Twitter users today found to their surprise that their devices were sending out tweets without their permission. What was common to the hundreds of thousands of tweets thus posted was a shortened goo.gl link apart from the fact that the messages contained nothing.

When they clicked on the URL, they were redirected to a page ending in 'm28sx.html'. According to a post on SOPHOS security blog post,  ''If you make the mistake of clicking on one of the malicious google links you are ultimately taken to a website which attempts to scare you into believing that you have a virus problem on your computer.

You are then frightened into installing malicious code on your PC, and asked to pay money to disinfect your systems''.

According to analysts though it is known that tweets with shortened URLs are always a security threat, what is intriguing is how accounts of Twitter users were compromised. They are wondering whether their usernames and passwords were stolen.

According to the SOPHOS blog,  ''all of the offending Twitter messages examined, so far claim to have been posted by "Mobile Web" (Twitter's "lite" interface for generic mobile phone users) rather than users' normal clients such as Tweetdeck or Twitter for iPhone".

Analysts have meanwhile cautioned users to delete suspicious tweets, and change their password ASAP.

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