It appears even Twitter isn't immune to spreading malware. In April 2012,
Kaspersky
researchers recently came across hundreds of compromised
Twitter accounts that are being used to spread malicious links leading
to fake anti-virus software.
"The compromised accounts spammed up to 8 messages per second, with
links redirecting users to the infamous
BlackHole
exploit kit," writes Kaspersky Lab's Nicolas Brulez. "Upon
following such a link, users received an alert about malicious
activities on their computer and the need to do a fast scan of their
system files."
The scan, of course, inevitably finds threats on the user's system and
advises the installation of a rogue antivirus solution that
asks the user to register the software to remove the infections.
The only real infection is the installation of the scanning
software itself.
"The rogue tweets contained messages such as 'online virus check,'
'proven anti-virus,' 'excellent anti-virus,' as well as links to
websites with .TK and .TW1.SU domain names," writes PCWorld's Lucian
Constantin. "The high variation of links, messages and hijacked
accounts used in this spam campaign could explain why Twitter's
automated spam filters weren't successful at blocking it."
"The security firm reported that 540 compromised accounts had sent out
4,148 tweets, linking to 44 unique domains, but Brulez said the numbers
are likely to be higher as the campaign was on-going," writes Computer
Weekly's Warwick Ashford.
Kaspersky detected the threats as
Trojan-FakeAV.Win32.Agent.dqs and Trojan-FakeAV.Win32.Romeo.dv with 540
unique Twitter accounts being infected. There were 4148 total Tweets
pointing to 44 unique domains during the Twitter attack.
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