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Twitter Trends Targeted By Scareware Crooks
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2009-06-03
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Over the weekend, Twitter was hit with what was thought to be the first scareware distribution attack. It didn't stop at the weekend, though. Scareware attacks continue through today as cybercrooks target trending topics.
 | | Twitter Trends Targeted By Scareware Crooks |  |
In a similar manner to how blackhat SEOs took over Google search results this spring to redirect trusting users to scareware sites-sites falsely warning targets of viruses on their machine, offering fake system scans, promoting expensive fake anti-virus programs, and installing Trojans-Twitter crooks are following popular topics.
Today, for example, as the band Phish's "PhishTube Broadcast" became listed to the side of the microblogging platform, cybercrooks spammed the topic via bogus accounts, taking advantage of URL shorteners to mask the destination site. According to PandaLabs, the links led to malware residing on PornTube.
"Clicking on any element inside of the PornTube page resulted in a run of the mill Adware/PrivacyCenter infection," writes PandaLabs' Sean-Paul Correll, "but the interesting part of it all is that cyber criminals are starting to target social networking sites more than ever. In this case they took advantage of the open dialog on Twitter and essentially blended in with the trending topics in order to effectively trick unsuspecting users into clicking malicious links."
Correll found that zombie accounts were posting hundreds of malicious tweets targeting popular topics like Conan O'Brien, E3, and Will Ferrell. Applications allowing people to automate their tweets makes spamming Twitter's trending topics list incredibly easy.
Security company Finjan says this weekend's attack invited Twitterers to click on a "best video" link leading to a scareware application hidden within what appeared to be a YouTube video. This triggered a second download of malware-infected PDF file.
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