Coarse phishing: Twitter hit by phishing scam
Phishing is the “art” of using a genuine looking link to lure web users to a page which asks them to fill in their login details for a particular site or service. I remember spotting countless phishing attempts back in the days when I used MySpace, but the ‘P’ word has cropped up again over the last few days thanks to scams on Facebook and Twitter.
The Twitter scam uses the site’s Direct Message (DM) function to send a false message and link and is, inevitably, big news on the Twitter stream. A search for “phishing” and for the #phishingalert hashtag show that tweets about the scam are being posted at a rate of a few a minute.
Once again, Twitter’s community characteristics have been pivotal in tackling the spread of phishing. Given the rate of tweets about the subject, a large number of Twitter users will now be aware of the phishing threat. Top blogs like Mashable and Chris Brogan have posted warnings too. Every little helps.
As with all phishing attacks, all you can really do is be aware, change your password and don’t click anything out of character in your DM inbox.
Twitter itself has received criticism for its handling of the situation. A small and barely noticeable warning has been included on the page, along with a couple of tweets and posts on the Twitter blog, and David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now doesn’t think it’s enough. He argues that Twitter should be communicating better about the scam.
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