Holiay hackers are taking advantage of holiday themes on Twitter to trick users into clicking and opening malware on their computers. They are writing tweets like “Nobody cares about Hanukkah” or “Shocking video of the Grinch” and when users click on them, they end up at a fake codec site which leads to a malicious Trojan downloader. The hackers literally flood twitter with these massages and sit back and watch their victims download the malicious Trojans. Recently, 300 Twitter accounts have been identified as targeting various trending topics on the website.
The actual cause of this event is people who like to create problems for naïve people. These people have nothing better to do during the holiday season than creating malware and viruses and sending them around the World Wide Web and watching people accidentally download their viruses.
First of all everyone should have anti-virus on their computers and hopefully when someone unknowingly clicks on this Trojan downloader, that the anti-virus will catch it. If not the person is out of luck because they should be smart enough to not click on anything that looks suspicious. Just as we are told not to open an email if we do not know who it is from, we should not click on links on Twitter, or any website for that matter, if we don’t know the person who put the link there from the beginning. It is awful that people always need to be on their guard when browsing their computer but there are awful people in this world who have made this necessary.
http://www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3915636/Holiday-Twitter-Topics-Concealing-Malware.htm
Monday, December 6, 2010
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Over the past couple years Twitter has seen a drastic rise in popularity and with that is an increase of hacking attempts through Twitter. In the article above describes malware that can affect your computer if you click on certain links in different tweets, which I have personally seen on Twitter. Because tweets are limited to a certain number of characters it is not uncommon for people that post links to use URL shorteners. This is convenient, however it does not allows the viewer to know exactly where the link goes without a little bit of extra work. Since people with twitter accounts are so used to seeing shortened URLs it is easy for malware infected sites such as "goo.gl/R7f68″ (a recently discovered bad link that has been spreading on Twitter) to look like ordinary links. As Casey said in his article, it is a shame that we must constantly be alert for these sort of malicious attacks, but it is necessary.
ReplyDeleteAlong attacks through Twitter links, there have also been some attack through applications. There are certain Twitter applications that need access to you account to run, such as mobile Twitter apps. Some of these applications claim that they can help you manage you followers and people that you follow if you allow access to your account, but it if necessary to be wary. Hackers are also starting to show up in some of these applications that claim to provide a service but contain malicious code. To protect yourself from these attacks you not only should be sure to have anti-virus software (as always), but also you should make sure that any application that you allow access to your account comes from a trusted source. As usual, the best way to protect yourself from web attacks is by increasing your knowledge of the potential and current attacks and always be on the lookout for hackers because hackers are always on the lookout for you.