Botnet Using Twitter to Send Spam Advertisements and Other Trash

As per the news reports from PCMagazine published on October 5, 2009, a botnet seems to be utilizing Twitter to send bulk messages containing advertisements and other junk material. During October 3-4, 2009, numerous users on Twitter were sending a error missive, which reported the blowing up of file server during that weekend and said there were more than 1,000 SQL backup related to job failures that reached the mailbox.

More clicks revealed suspicious tweets and those one that recommended the recipient to visit http://digg.com/[removed] for comparing the ten most popular web-hosting providers, which all apparently contained a freely available domain k. Another tweet forbade buying white teeth, instead asked to learn a mother's trick for converting yellow teeth into sparkling white by paying $5.

It is not that all the tweets have web-links embedded in them, suggesting that the bot might have made a mistake. Thus, security experts have cautioned twitters to be careful of suspicious tweets such as mentioned above and avoid clicking on links arbitrarily.

Twitter's popularity appears to be proving both good and bad since new visitors flocking in attract numerous scammers and spammers who seem to be prospering via the anonymity and immediate communication potential of the huge social network of Twitter.

However, Twitter meanwhile has been putting in place measures for tackling scammers and spammers despite its appearance as a whack-a-mole game in which fresh spam profiles emerge whenever a shutdown happens.

Security experts said that there could be various forms of Twitter scams and spam, where their malicious purposes disguise as web-links, which are condensed based on the Twitter's 140-character limit. Shortening the 'uniform resource locator' (URL) with a URL shortening program makes the new address without any similarity with the actual one. Any user of Twitter might follow a link leading to a promised tale, but in reality land him on an Internet site, which drops malware.

During September end-week, a phishing scam spread through Twitter's direct tweets, compromising accounts that subsequently spammed a missive reading "rofl this you on here?" and displaying a link namely videos.twitter.secure-logins01.com.

Related article: Botnet Misuses Google Analytics

» SPAMfighter News - 10/26/2009