Do Twitter Phishing Scams Herald the End of Microblogs?

An anonymous reader writes "Twitter's been hit by a big phishing scam. Culture Crash blogger Dan Tynan says this is the end of Twitter's innocence. Will tweets become like email, with two out of every three just worthless spam?"

Comments

Twitter spam easy to stop

[Jason Levine]

Many people who are replying don't seem to use Twitter or even understand really what is going on with the phishing. Since I use Twitter, I'll explain:

With Twitter, you set up lists of people that you follow. When you follow someone, you can then see their Twitter messages on your main screen (or in your client application if you use one). Everyone else following that person can see the person's messages. People you follow can also send you Direct Messages. These messages aren't seen by anyone but the sender and recipient. In this respect, it is sort of like e-mail only it requires a "trusted relationship" to have been formed first i.e. No spamming from joe_random@somesite.com to everyone_else@somewhere-else.org.

What the Phishers are doing are sending DMs from compromised accounts telling the recipients about some blog post that they should check out. The recipients (assuming they fall for the phish), see a page that looks like the Twitter login page (but is really on access-logins.com). They enter their username and password and now the Phishers have another account to send DMs from. Rinse and repeat. I strongly suspect that there's a Phase Two in there that involves more than just collecting Twitter account information but so far they are just collecting accounts.

Stopping it is easy. If you change your password, they no longer have access. People have been outing people who "sent" them DMs (and thus were compromised). If a person doesn't fix their situation, you could unfollow them. This would mean they could no longer send you Direct Messages. As people stop following compromised people, they will either fix the problem or will dwindle to zero followers. Spam stopped. (If only e-mail spam were so easy to stop.)

And to address the "Twitter is useless" commentary, yes there are a lot of people on Twitter who post inane things. Then again, there are some good posters. (For example, I follow Greg Grunberg from Heroes and love reading his tweets.) I think you'll find that in any online medium. Blogs are like this, web sites are like this, even comments on Slashdot are like this. Choose a random Slashdot article and browse at -1. You're sure to find many worthless comments for every worthwhile comment. As for Twitter, I tend not to follow the inane Twitter posters, so I don't see those posts in my Twitter-feed. Like any online tool, Twitter is only what you make of it.