Spammers Realize Twitter as Soft Target

Security analysts have highlighted that the popular micro-blogging website "Twitter" has apparently become a favorite destination for the cybercriminals intending to defraud people into fake scams relating to debt-reduction services, government grants, and penile-enhancement pills.

Speaking technically, we are witnessing Twitter spam 2.0 at present, stated Christopher Peri, CEO, Twittfilter - a web-based application. This is reported by FOX News on June 2, 2009.

According to Peri, the tweet showing a picture of a pretty girl was the first phase of spam on Twitter. While people were having a glance at the tweet, they realized that they had been spammed.

Peri further explained that this technique of circulating spam was, in fact, highly inefficient. In this technique, the spammer had to put in a good amount of manual work and was rather easy to block. Citing an example, he said that when Twitter adopters in the past started reporting the spamming issue back to the home base of Twitter in San Francisco, the problem was fixed in a short notice of time.

Though, the second iteration of Twitter spam which is being observed at present, i.e. Twitter spam 2.0, is much tough to detect and thus, a lot of efforts are needed to ensure protection against it. The scenario is especially worse for the unaware users.

Security experts said that in the next generation Twitter spam, fraudsters are making use of computers to discover keywords in order to launch targeted attack against some specific users. They are bringing in advanced and sophisticated techniques; as a result of this, unsolicited posts presently hold a share of 10% in the total tweets hitting the inbox of a user.

Twitter officials, in fact, realize that they have got entangled into a severe spam problem. Although they have taken several initiatives to cope up with this issue, limited success has been attained so far, as reported by PCWorld on June 2, 2009.

Twitter's official blog post stated that the huge number of followers, who are not really interested in tweets but are simply seeking attention, has elevated the problem for the site because this is proving a roadblock for Twitter to differentiate the genuine users from the spammers.

Related article: Spammers Continue their Campaigns Successfully

» SPAMfighter News - 6/6/2009