Spam From Compromised Twitter Accounts

[Peaches]

Spam from compromised Twitter accounts

Approximately 750 Twitter user accounts were recently subverted and used to post spam messages. The posts, intended to drive traffic to a pornographic web site, read "hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www.chatwebcamfree.com." A quick search of the micro-blogging site reveals a list of users who had their accounts compromised and used to post the spam messages. According to a post by Graham Cluley on his Sophos blog, "the index page of that web site serves up obfuscated JavaScript that loads a variety of pornographic adverts and contains a web form directed to a site called eroticgateway.com."

A Twitter blog post confirming that accounts had been compromised, suggests that it's likely these are brute force attacks succeeding against user accounts with weak password. Twitter says that they have reset the passwords for the compromised accounts, which should prevent any further spam messages from being sent by the attacker. Earlier this year, an 18 year old US student, that goes by the handle 'GMZ', gained access to several accounts by using a brute force attack and made posts to users Twitter home pages. Accounts that were compromised included Fox News, Britney Spears and Barack Obama.

Heise security –

http://www.h-online.com/security/Spam-from...s--/news/112796