This morning I’ve checked twitter and see that half a dozen people I follow have sent me direct messages (DMs – the private messages) containing the same message:
“OMG, who the f*ck shared this of me. I am so p*ssed.”
As you know I’ve written about phishing messages before.
Other recent messages include:
“Want to lose any weight? go here: [link removed] best product for losing weight”
“Someone said this real bad thing about you in a blog….[link removed]”
“You seen what this person is saying about you? [link removed] terrible things..”
Get the idea? The objective of these tweets is to make you click the link, where you are taken to a site that pretends to be a twitter login page but is actually harvesting your login details.
If you get one of these messages:
Please let the person know by sending them a public message like this:
“@username, your account has been hacked and is sending out phishing DMs – follow the instructions on Twitter’s website here to remove.
If your account has been compromised
Don’t worry, it happens to lots of people because they often get the messages from people they trust. Follow the ‘my account has been compromised’ guidelines on Twitter’s site. This involves:
- Changing your password to a new, secure one
- Revoking access to third party applications which might have compromised your account
- Deleting the direct messages and public tweets the hacker may have sent from your account – like a virus they can spread!
Remember, if you use the same email address/username and password for other sites, these might also be compromised, so change them too. I use LastPass to manage passwords so every site has a different one, yet I only have to remember one password.
There is also a very useful article about keeping your account secure on twitter here.
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