E-mails Advertising Pornographic Webcam Spammed to Twitter Users

A new attack targeting users of Twitter was noticed on March 6, 2009 when hijacked accounts began dispatching spam mails that promoted a pornographic webcam chat service.

The threat arrives through an e-mail message that contains a title "hey! 23/Female." It invites the recipient for a chat on the sender's webcam at www.chatwebcamfree.com. Victims who follow the link, however, are taken to an adult website.

Security experts said that the Twitter accounts compromising began on March 6, 2009, with the social network saying that criminals hijacked about 750 accounts during the entire course of the assault.

Twitter also suggested that any user who might have unknowingly replied to the message need to reset his Twitter account password instantly. It also disclosed that it had changed the passwords relating to all hijacked accounts.

Besides, users are recommended that they follow secured password management involving selection of strong and lengthy passwords, including capital and small alphabets, special characters and numerical digits.

Commenting on the recent attack, Graham Cluley, Security Researcher at Sophos, wrote on his blog that increasing attacks were being observed from spammers, malware authors, phishers, identity thieves and other scammers targeting social networks such as Twitter, as reported by Sophos on March 6, 2009. Cluley added that the attacks against the social network users were not simply proof-of-concept attacks within controlled conditions but full-blooded attacks on the Web daily that churn real cash out of unsuspecting people.

He further said that the kind of attack on Twitter had occurred on other social networking sites as well in the past like on Facebook in February 2009 that suggested to the analyst that probably the same gang of cyber criminals were behind the Twitter attack.

Security specialists further state that phishers and spammers are targeting Twitter from the time they realized the possibility and profitability in phishing and spamming Twitter accounts. Meanwhile, due to the rising popularity of Twitter, the company warded off numerous click-jacking attempts in February 2009. Many other celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Barack Obama have similarly been targeted in hacking, phishing and spamming in the recent months.

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» SPAMfighter News - 3/14/2009