Twitter Suspends Spammer Sara Cross Account

Twitter user "Sara Cross", aka Sara4877, who raised suspicion in the mind of Senior Technology Consultant at Sophos, Graham Cluley, has 'her/his' Twitter account suspended.

In fact, this suspicion encouraged Cluley took the initiative and posted a blog describing the spammer along with a video clip of Sara. Consequently, Sara stopped distributing malicious spam from "her" account, leading to the eventual freezing of the account.

Moreover, to prevent spammers and the distribution of their messages, Cluley's video clip displays the method of identifying a potential Twitter spammer who might be chasing a user. For instance, if the person following a user owns a fresh account with nil posts, or very little in number and appears to follow users with an identical surname, then it is possible that that account belongs to a spammer.

As the number of users on Twitter grows, spam will become a big problem. This spam, which comes from fake Twitter accounts, chases numerous people each time in anticipation of return e-mails. The messages spammed usually contain links pointing to sales sites, dating sites or even sites containing malicious software.

Cluley further said that the best policy is to stop suspicious e-mail senders like Sara who chase with spam messages. Further, if a user believes he/she has met a spammer, then that person should inform Twitter staff by twittering @spam, as reported by Sophos on January 26, 2009.

Cluley also observes that Twitter should do more in stopping spammers from setting up accounts automatically and employing software to chase people they think of flooding the site with undesirable e-mails. In fact, as Twitter becomes more popular, this issue will only worsen unless Twitter proactively eradicates it.

However, with Twitter suspending "Sara Cross" account so fast, Cluley asked other accountholders to praise Twitter. Meanwhile, it is still unclear as to what number of additional accounts the spammer might have set up in the short duration attack. The attacker had reportedly hacked into around 33 Twitter accounts on January 5, 2009, some of which belonged to celebrities like Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez and Britney Spears.

Related article: Twitter Flaw Compels Victims to Follow Hacker’s Account

» SPAMfighter News - 2/11/2009