Twitter Stimulates Online Crime

According to Kaspersky Lab the security company, ever-since the micro-blogging website Twitter was introduced during July 2006, numerous people have been utilizing it in their daily lives for communicating messages crafted within the standard 140 characters, published ITWeb in news on April 14, 2011.

Yet, in spite of the many flashy demographics along with an increased growth of Twitter, the website has had to fight a large number of malware incidences. These incidences are as varied as click-jacking, account compromising, Trojans, and hacks that have enabled cyber-criminals to use the service widely for launching assaults across the Web.

Says security researcher Timothy Armstrong at Kaspersky Lab, there has been many historical developments in the security of Twitter despite it being more-or-less young. Attacks on it have been varied such as hacked admins, trending topics and account compromises amongst others, he adds. ITWeb published this on April 14, 2011.

Further according to Timothy, during August 2008, cyber-criminals attacked Twitter wherein they crafted a malicious web-page containing an advertisement promoting one erotic film. So when anyone clicked on it, he became contaminated with a Trojan-downloader that disguised as an Adobe Flash update.

Also, during 2009, several versions of a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) virus attacked Twitter. Innumerable messages apparently, signed off from Mikey emerged as the virus spread. Again in 2009, online crooks compromised Twitter trending subjects for delivering malicious software.

Thereafter, one fresh Koobface variant shortly facilitated in propagating its infection via Twitter accounts. Thus, when a contaminated member tried to access the website, Koobface compromised the communication session following which it masqueraded as that member and tweeted in contaminating his contacts.

Meanwhile, even with the lot of security measures adopted for aiding in lessening security threats, it appears that different stages of assaults will continue to hit social-networking websites. For, hackers still manage to invade the broadcasting arena easily because of its ready availability on social websites by abusing trending topics.

Given this, Armstrong concludes that it's thus important that users remain wary of the different kinds of malware, which Twitter has encountered owing to cyber-criminals' active exploitation of the site, reported ITWeb.

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

» SPAMfighter News - 4/26/2011