back to article Twitter Trends exploited to promote scareware

Hackers are manipulating a hot topics feature of Twitter to promote malware-infected websites. The gaming of the Twitter Trends feature recalls the manipulation of Google search results using black-hat search engine optimisation techniques. In the case of the Twitter attack, cyber-criminals created hundreds of accounts and …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Gary Hockin
    Paris Hilton

    How hard can it be?

    How difficult can it be to grammatically detect coordinated tweets which contain links to malicious websites?

    Too hard.

    PH -- because she likes it too hard.

  2. Lionel Baden

    hack a twit a Day

    this is getting really out of hand

    almost 1 per day now !!!!

  3. Mike Flugennock

    Checked out the link on the YouTube problem...

    ...and it pretty much sums up why, whenever I upload a fresh video to any of my YouTube channels, the first thing I do is disable comments of any kind, either written or video responses. Come to think of it, I'm surprised that I haven't seen any video response spam, nor heard any news about malicious links in those annoying-assed pop-up ads that occasionally infest YouTube (I go there with JavaScript disabled, so I see them very rarely).

    When I first started posting there, I left comments open, but after about the third go-round of having to scrape out the flamage and the sex/dating site spam, I decided the hell with it, and went back and reset the preferences on stuff I'd already uploaded to "do not allow comments", and began disabling comments on my new uploads from then on. Presto, zero headaches.

    As far as grammatical matches for nailing Twitter spam...I don't know about anyone else here, but long ago I set up a filter rule flagging my email spam based on identical instances of spelling/grammatical mangling -- almost as if it were written by a Chinese, or badly translated from Chinese -- that appeared repeatedly in multiple spams, usually for C1AL!5 or V1AGRA or some bogus herbal crap; for instance, I was able to nail a fair amount of Chinese bogus medicine spams by using the keyword "sidebacks" -- where the writer obviously meant to say "side effects".

  4. Moss Icely Spaceport
    Thumb Up

    Well, they came to the right place

    There will be plenty of twits (twats?) who'll regularly fall for this crap.

    @Fail

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Twitter - a phenomonal WANK

    Phenomonal wanks are for wankers.....

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like