@jchiatt

The past week, a few different spam threads have been circulating around Twitter. One claims that someone said something bad about you, one claims you can see who ‘stalks’ your Twitter, one claims that millions are making 5k+/month and one claims that they lost a bunch of weight. I’m sure there are others, but if you just look for strange, bizarre messages like these, you should be able to spot these fake threads of spam.

These spam messages are called ‘phishing attacks’, or fake login websites that malicious hackers set up to fool you into giving them your login information. They may use your login information for a number of things, mainly to circulate their phishing attack even further. Here I’m going to show you how to prevent these attacks and also how to recover from them if you fall victim to one.

Prevention

The main thing to remember when facing these types of attacks is if you are redirected to anything asking for your password after clicking a link, DO NOT PUT YOUR USERNAME OR PASSWORD IN. The easiest way is to check the web address of the site the link took you too. If it doesn’t start with (http://www.twitter.com), you are under a phishing attack. Now of course there are some common sense things like if you receive a direct message randomly that is advertising something then it is obviously spam and about the ones that say you can see who stalks your Twitter or how someone said something bad about you - who cares? Just ignore things like that either way.

Below are some screenshots of the various types of tweets and direct messages that I have come in contact with over the course of this week. I’m sure there are more though.

Recovery

Now let’s say you’ve already fallen victim to an attack. Here’s what you need to do immediately:

1. Change your password immediately.
2. If you use the same password for you email address, it would be a good idea to change your email address password as well (as well as other online accounts that use that same password).
3. Wouldn’t hurt to apologize to your followers for the spam.
4. If you see that it seems that someone else’s Twitter has been compromised, be kind and let them know and point them to this blog post.

Hopefully this helps - if you have any questions just shoot me a tweet - @jchiatt