With the recent rash of people falling victim to phishingscams on Twitter, in comes this question by a reader regarding her account being compromised.
Hi there. My twitter account was a victim of phishing. Twitter suspended my account because of it. I have sent them a request to lift my suspension but haven’t heard from them the last 5 days since I lodged the request. Any tips on how I can get them to respond to my request?
Please keep in mind that telling her to avoid clicking links or entering their info into a random site is pretty much a moot point at this time. I think she’s pretty aware of that by now. What would you do in this situation, though?
Twitter have alerted Twitter users that there has been a Phishing attack on many of their users over the weekend. You can read their full post (with updates) on it on their blog.
The Phishing ’scam’ went like this:
Emails were sent out to Twitter users that resembled emails you’d get if you got a Direct Message. The email said that a blog post had been written about the Twitter user and contained a link. The link led to a page that looked like the Twitter front page – complete with a login form.
It seems that quite a few Twitter users didn’t realize that they were not on the front page of Twitter and logged in anyway – in doing so giving their login details.
Once this happened the second wave of attack has set in with those people who gave away their login details now having their accounts being used to send DM’s to their friends telling their friends to check out a link on a blog. Again these links were directed to a page looking like a Twitter front page.
It seems that the attack didn’t have much more agenda than to cause trouble as to this point there are only reports of the information being used to keep the scam going – but none the less many Twitter accounts seem to have been compromised (I’ve had 20+ DMs from legit Twitter users in the last 12 hours).
Twitter have acted pretty quickly and have reset the passwords on accounts that have been compromised and have reported the URLs concerned to OpenDNS’ and Google’s reported phishing lists. I just visited the page and firefox warned me of the danger.
If you’re trying to login to Twitter and your password has been reset by Twitter you can reset it here.
Update – it seems that the phishers are now starting to send DMs using the accounts of those who have given their login details that invite people to visit an iPhone site. While Twitter say they’ve changed people’s passwords I’m still getting quite a few of these DMs. Looks like this Phishing thing has still got legs!
