Twitter – Page 7 – Paul's Tech Talk

Hijacked Accounts being used to spam

PaulApril 29, 2009

I just read this from Security Fix and Thought I should talk about it some to better help people fix this:

Dear Friend,

New shopping new life!

How are u doing these days?Yesterday I found a web of a large trading company from china,which is an agent of all the well-known digital product factories,and facing to both wholesalers,retailsalers,and personal customer all over the world. They export all kinds of digital products and offer most competitive and reasonable price and high quality goods for our clients,so i think we you make a big profit if we do business with them.And they promise they will provide the best after-sales-service.In my opinion we can make a trial order to test that.

Look forward to your early reply!

According to Security, they are advertising the Easylifeing.com domain and have compromised GMAIL and Yahoo Mail. This resembles the ones that happen to some other Accounts. Check [intlink id=”3330″ type=”post”]Yahoo article[/intlink] and the [intlink id=”3233″ type=”post”]Hotmail Article[/intlink] for other example of compromised accounts.

I must keep reminding people that you shouldn’t have a easy password for those account it shouldn’t be anything someone can guess like a name or place or even a word. It should be something with Letters and Number, both lower and higher case. You should also consider not writing it down where people can see it just in case you have visitors. Probably best to use a [intlink id=”2646″ type=”post”]password manager[/intlink] to keep your passwords from prying eyes.

We know that this all comes down to either a dictionary attack or a phishing attack. You can decide which, but I am going to assume it was someone Phishing for your password. If you only use one password for several accounts that can be very dangerous, you should not keep the same password for each account. Just like people phishing for your [intlink id=”2650″ type=”post”]Twitter account[/intlink] or your [intlink id=”3008″ type=”post”]Facebook account[/intlink], if you use one password for all then he has that password for every account.

I can see why spammers are going to be using this heavily in the the coming months to years because these will not be thrown into the spam folder, being that you know the person or persons sending the email. You probably have it set up to not put it in the spam. The more eyes who see this more chance that they will get someone to buy something, and the more people who see it the more money they make.

Your best bet is if you see someone doing something like this you should contact them by phone if possible, or you should email them back and tell them to change there password. This I am sure will be an even harder job for the IT guys because they will have to start monitoring this type of traffic more often then not. Although it isn’t a bad idea to have a[intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”] Free anti-virus or a Free Firewall[/intlink] installed just to be on the safe side.

Suicide Threat Prompts Twitter users to Respond

PaulApril 21, 2009

I saw this and had to talk a little about it:

As you can see people would worried about the Twitter Liquidwings, and I don’t blame them. According to his post:

[ad#cricket-right-ez]As you cans see is tweets (1,2,3,4,5,6, and 7) was posted on twitter and people responded with the reqeust to find this person and try to help. I hope more people do this if they find that someone is wanting to kill them or talks about killing people.

we should all be watching for that kinda of talk online and offline. Although this isn’t really Security related this is a very important subject.

Please report any thing you think is real to @twitter And hopefully they will create an account for just that. I would hope that people who thinking of suicide or killing will find professional help. Although that is up to them to do ultimately. I just have to say to the people who responded, Thank you for help this one person!! Keep it up.

Are you seeing the fail whale — Oprah to Kill Twitter!!

PaulApril 16, 2009

I found Oprahs twitter account and this isn’t funny, every time I refresh her account it keeps getting bigger!! I was going to search for her and I see this:

According to people on twitter that she will talk about Twitter tomorrow, April 17, 2009. So what does that mean there will be a whole influx of people joining Twitter and people following her so I would imagine tomorrow and the next few days, you will see the great white whale!! Twitter will be sluggish and possible unresponsive the next few days also.

[ad#text-broadband1]

You best bet is not stress Twitter out to much but I am curious to see if this actually breaks Twitter. Only time will tell but I am sure going to keep watch on this just because this is big news!!

*Update*
From the tweets I am seeing this all stems from:

Just to let you know he has 977,307 as of current but that should change. So this will be rocking Twitter tomorrow guys!!

StalkDaily.com was the culprit afterall!!

PaulApril 12, 2009

In my previous post, [intlink id=”3308″ type=”post”]about StalkDaily[/intlink] I thought they were the innocent party in all this:

[ad#cricket-right-ez]Now he talks about how he did this and claims responsibility for the Twitter calamity. According to him he did this out of boredom, and needed a way to make money. I am wondering if Twitter will do some legal actions against him for the time it took to fix the problem and fact that it caused so much widespread panic for people to not trust Twitter makes me think that Twitter would have a real good case against a 17 year old who was trying to gain the system.

Then the people who have lost followers or have had problems with their twitter are going to be mad to, They were the innocent party and did not know about the Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability, although it doesn’t appear to have gotten any passwords or sensitive data.

Although It does prove a p0int that the no script addon in Firefox is looking to be more and more needed as people search through the web.

Stalkdaily worm strikes Twitter — Brings down the House!!

PaulApril 12, 2009

According to Techcrunch, this seems to of happened today where this worm has brought down twitter. I have been using the Twitter Client Tweetdeck and have not had any problems like they have had with this site. I wouldn’t visit the site in question because you would most likely get the worm. It seems to be a very good hack it sends out spam on your twitter account like this:

[ad#cricket-right-ez]If you have been infected twitter is suggesting you password reset and requesting a new password. Some other removal information can be found here. I will update as necessary when I find out more.

*Update a Few hours*
It looks like Twitter had a Cross Site Scripting going on, and it wasn’t really Stalkdaily who did it rather someone injected code into twitter to grab peoples browser Cache. See this post for more information.

According to watch I am seeing Stalkdaily is now safe to surf to as long as you don’t click on links on twitter just yet. I have found that if you make sure you aren’t logged into twitter in your browser you are much better at preventing this type of attacks. You can see the screenshot of stalkdaily website and it looks like they are an innocent party.