Twitter was hit by a major phishing scam yesterday. Apparently users thought that their friends had sent them a funny video to watch, but that wasn’t the case.
There were actually two different attacks going on at the same time and one involved taking over accounts and using them to sent stuff to users which seemed to come from their friends.
This kind of think is growing fast because of the vast numbers of people who are accessible via Twitter and Facebook and similar social networking sites.
Several hundred people fell foul of this scam before it was identified.
Hackers set up fake accounts and started following legitimate users on Twitter. Then they sent links to them which turned out to be phishing sites (sites that try to get information). What they did was to ask for the person’s Twitter account details so that they could access the accounts and use them to send out more links to another phishing site.
These criminals use the information to get access to other accounts, or to access other internet accounts like email and other protected sites like banks accounts. So this is why we are advised not to use the same details for all accounts on line.
This is not the first time Twitter has been hacked in this way.
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