Beware Twitter Phishing

I have recently received an attempt at phishing - to obtain my Twitter username and password. I'll tell you what happened and how you can avoid falling foul of these scams...
27 Sep, 2011

I received a Direct Message (DM) from one of my Twitter followers the other day. The message text read…

This made me laugh so hard when i saw this about you lol mf1.jp/VXLSiQ

You may have received similar messages – DMs from Twitter are perfectly normal and are there so that Twitter users can send direct messages to other Twitter users.

Twitter logo

Twitter Logo

The odd thing about this particular message, though, was that the link at the end of the message went to a site that looked like Twitter – but was not the real Twitter. It was a site called ltwittier.com, and I was prompted to log in with my Twitter username and password. This is a classic Phishing scam, designed to get you to hand over your Twitter login details so that the phishers can then log in to your account and send these messages to your followers too.

You need to guard against this sort of thing as it can compromise your account and cause damage to the reputation you have with all of those followers that you have worked hard to build up over the past few years.

Protect yourself and your business

  • The most important rule is to always make sure you are logging in to the site that you think you’re logging in to – if the URL address doesn’t say twitter.com then it possibly isn’t Twitter that you are logging in to.
  • Make sure that you take notice of any phishing warnings that your browser gives you – most browsers these days have phishing-protection add-ons that you can easily install that should warn you when you’re going to a suspect site.
  • If it’s already too late and one of your accounts has been compromised, make sure you change your password (and consider changing passwords for other accounts if you use the same password elsewhere).

Not sure if your Twitter account has been hacked?

Check it out.

Go to Twitter and take a look at “Your Tweets”. Run back through them for a week or two and see whether there are any there that you don’t recognise.

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Martin Jarvis

Martin Jarvis

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