Twitter plays host to data-stealing malware
Published: 06 Aug 2008 13:04 BST
Cybercriminals have started targeting malware at microblogging service Twitter.
Kaspersky Lab has uncovered a fake Twitter profile created solely for the purpose of infecting people's computers.
The profile, with an alias that means 'pretty rabbit' in Portuguese, has posted a link that purports to be a pornographic video, but is instead Trojan software, masquerading as MP3 files, that steals data from users' machines, according to Kaspersky's Viruslist.com blog.
"If you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash, which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file labelled Adobe Flash on your machine — a technique that is currently very popular," the blog states.
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The attack is dangerous because it does not require programming skills and could spread easily if it ends up high in Google search-engine rankings — something that is possible, as Google indexes unprotected Twitter profiles. Twitter is a free networking service that lets people post their 'status' — a brief message about what they are doing — and keep track of other people by viewing their status.
This isn't the only security problem to have hit Twitter. Last week, researcher Aviv Raff launched a website, Twitpwn, devoted to Twitter security issues.
In his first dated post, Raff wrote about a vulnerability that allows an attacker to force someone to follow them automatically. The vulnerability could still be exploited on Internet Explorer, he wrote on Monday in the US.
"A spammer or phisher could abuse this vulnerability to gain thousands of 'followers' and attempt social-engineering attacks," Ryan Naraine, security evangelist at Kaspersky, wrote in a blog on ZDNet.com.
Credit: Twitter targeted by malware attacks from CNET News
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