Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack

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Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 21, 2010 @07:22AM from the 140-character-judgment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Twitter users are being warned not to click on messages saying "'ol, this is funny,' as they can lead to their account details being stolen. A widespread attack has hit Twitter this weekend, tricking users into logging into a fake Twitter page — and thus handing their account details over to hackers. Messages include Lol. this is me?? / lol , this is funny. / ha ha, u look funny on here / Lol. this you?? followed by a link in the form of http://example/ [dot] com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma [dot] net/login, where 'example.com' can vary. Clicking on the link redirects users to the second-half of the link, where the fake login page is hosted. In a video and blog entry, computer security firm Sophos is warning users that it is not just Twitter direct messages (DMs) that carry the poisoned links, but they are appearing on public profiles due to services such as GroupTweet which republish direct messages. Sophos also reports that the site being used for the Twitter phishing has also been constructed to steal information from users of the Bebo social network. Affected users are advised to change their passwords immediately."

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You can't have twitter without by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-21 07:23 · Score: 5, Insightful

twits.
Lol by indrora · 2010-02-21 07:28 · Score: 5, Funny

this is funny.
1. Re:Lol by wjh31 · 2010-02-21 08:26 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  that is so meta
we need to stop coddling stupidity. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-21 07:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Seriously, anyone with more than a few functional neurons is not going to type their password into a page they reached by clicking on a link from "LOL this is funny!".
We need to let people like that sink or swim. People end up being as stupid as we let them be. If we expect complete idiocy, we will *get* complete idiocy, and that harms the experience for the rest of us.
I say let these people experience the consequences of their own actions.
1. Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. by InterruptDescriptorT · 2010-02-21 07:44 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I don't necessarily disagree with you when you say 'We need to let people like that sink or swim', but in this world of tightly connected social networks where friendship among individuals governs their level of access to your details, I'm not so sure about that. You're only as secure as your weakest link. If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme and gives up his login information to the attackers, then your information is exposed to them, and you're put at risk. This is why while I sympathize with your point, I still think it's incredibly important that phishing attacks like this be cracked down upon as quickly as possible to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening.
  
  --
  Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
2. Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. by asdf7890 · 2010-02-21 08:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It isn't that your information is exposed if a friend's account is broken into (if you have stuff on Facebook or similar that you would care about being made public, then you are doing it wrong), it is the fact that a compromised account means the frauster has easten their way at least one level into your trust network. This means you have to think that little bit harder about your day-to-day link clicking (assuming some of your contacts are like some of mine and their dribblings are not always easy to distinguish from spam/phishing).
  The real problem is more dangerous phishing - that which attempts to gain access to bank details or attempts to convince the user to let some local code to install. There is no way we'll ever completely stamp that out just as there is no partical way of completely stamping out burglary. The only thing we can do is to try educate the general public (spit) to be a little (or in many cases a lot) less naive. This is unfortunately much easier said than done - some people seem incapable of maintaining a healthy level of synacism when promised free smilies/cheats/porm or just "lols".
  Every now and then I consider starting a small spam/phish campaign that collects data, throws it all away, and give the user s "why the hell were you stupid enough to do that?!?!" message. Perhaps distrubuting it as an app that collects Facebook account details and uses them to post a message stating "is stupid enough to give their password to a third party website" before deleting them. The second most significan reason I don't do this (the first being I'm too lazy to bother) is that the idiots caught and made to look daft would see me as the enemy and not learn anything more generally useful (like "if one anonymous site promising free shit can't be trusted with my password/creditcard/wife then maybe others can't either") from the exercise. Maybe banks could do it with their own customer base though - send out a fake phish and lock the accounts of people that fall for it until such time as the phone up and promise to be more careful in future.
3. Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. by nedlohs · 2010-02-21 08:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  If you put your information on facebook then it's already "exposed" to everyone. You'd have to be even dumber than someone who would fall for such a fake login link to think otherwise.
4. Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. by ObsessiveMathsFreak · 2010-02-21 08:38 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  We need to let people like that sink or swim.
  You must remember that when they sink, their bodies sink to the deep to feed the legions of bottom feeders, which in turn grow to monstrous size. Eventually, we get dread 100,000 strong botnet krakens which rise to the surface and drag sites under with all hands lost.
  In light of this, I prefer giving these users swim bands as a preventative measure.
  
  --
  May the Maths Be with you!
Interestingly... by DavidR1991 · 2010-02-21 07:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

...I just deliberately sought out this thing so I could see what it looked like - and amazingly, whatever it does, it manages to somehow hide the "Suspected phishing site" page in Google Chrome: It briefly appears but then the page seems to reload automatically and the page disappears
So not only is this a pretty sophisticated clone of Twitter's login, they've somehow managed to force their way past the attack warning too. Any ideas how they've done that?
1. Re:Interestingly... by VoltageX · 2010-02-21 07:56 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Worth reporting to Mozilla/Google?
  
  --
  "Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
2. Re:Interestingly... by iammani · 2010-02-21 08:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Firefox handles it well, the problem is only with Chrome
3. Re:Interestingly... by iammani · 2010-02-21 08:19 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Someone should report this to Chrome team and claim the $500 prize.
4. Re:Interestingly... by CubeDude213 · 2010-02-21 08:26 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I did the same thing when I got a direct message with it but Safari managed to warn me. I believe Safari uses Google’s database of phishing sites so it looks like a bug in Chrome.
Re:Where the sheeple graze by biryokumaru · 2010-02-21 07:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

wolves

Shouldn't that be "wovles?" It would make more sense for "wovles" to prey on "sheeple."

--
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Re:Where the sheeple graze by Neoprofin · 2010-02-21 08:09 · Score: 4, Funny

"Sheeples wovle but they don't fall down"
Re:MSN by Anonymous Coward · 2010-02-21 10:07 · Score: 2, Funny

I asked her what color her panties were and she said "j00z did 9/11!"
Weirdest sex chat I've ever had that didn't involve a robe and wizard hat.
Pretty simple solution... by EWAdams · 2010-02-21 11:02 · Score: 2, Insightful

... ignore Twitter. That can't be hard, can it? How many hundreds of thousands of years did the human race do without it? And what has it contributed? The prosecution rests.

--
I piss off bigots.
What about URL shortening services? by HockeyPuck · 2010-02-21 14:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've always wondered why we don't see more phishing attacks with URL shortening services. Why not just tweet "Hey check out the pictures of my latest vacation at my picasaweb page"? I don't think forcing users to install yet another plugin which checks out the tinyurl link as there's more than enough companies that do shorten URLs to make this plugin be yet another one which has to have to phone home to get updates...