Red Condor Alerts Users of a New Virus in a Twitter Invitation

E-mail security specialists at Red Condor, a security company, are alerting people that a new computer virus disguised as a Twitter invitation is circulating in the wild, while merely a handful of virus scanners have been able to detect the worm.

The fake e-mail, embedded with the virus and detected by Red Condor's researchers on May 21, 2009, displays the caption, "Your friend invited you to twitter!" and apparently shows a Twitter account as its origin.

The text of the e-mail says that the user, who has received an invitation to Twitter from his friend, should click on a given attachment to find out who this friend is. However, the attachment that apparently contains a PDF file is an executable with a malicious virus, the security researchers warned.

Commenting on the issue, Dr. Tom Steding, Chief Executive Officer, Red Condor, stated that Twitter, which had become an extremely popular tool for social interaction, was now being increasingly used for virus, phishing and spam attacks, as reported by PR-inside on May 22, 2009.

Steding added that due to Twitter remarkable expansion of user base, end-users were regularly receiving up-to-date e-mails from new users as well as 'Tweets,' while cyber criminals were wishing that Twitter users would believe everything that arrived in their account with the name of the tool on it.

The security specialists state that any platform experiencing a wide usage is sure to encourage malicious people to develop harmful codes. In particular, spam attacks on social networks are getting more and more common due to their rising popularity and also due to low security on these networks compared to other e-mail platforms.

Hence, the security specialists advise that users should know about spammers' new tendency of targeting Twitter. They also strongly recommend that anyone getting the particular invitation e-mail should delete it and report the breach to their IT department.

Twitter has lately been targeted by a phishing scam wherein scammers through phony Twitter accounts followed actual Twitter users to steal their login credentials. They used the stolen credential to upload Twitter messages carrying a phishing link.

Related article: Red Condor Reveals the Online Threat Scenario of 2009

» SPAMfighter News - 5/28/2009