Expert: Twitter accounts hijacked in new attack
Don't fall for that tweet promising a Webcam chat with a 23-year-old woman, warns Trend Micro researcher.
Twitter users looking for a little entertainment on a boring Friday may want to go elsewhere to get their fix.
A new attack was hijacking Twitter users Friday, with at least 700 accounts being compromised in two hours beginning at about 11 a.m. PST (7 p.m. GMT), security researcher Rik Ferguson wrote on the Trend Micro blog.
Victims are clicking on a link in a tweet that lures them with the promise of chatting with a 23-year-old woman on a Webcam.
"It appears that there is a rash of Twitter account hijacking going on this evening," Ferguson wrote.
"Obviously we recommend against clicking on this link, it leads to a porn Webcam portal which looks to have been designed with credit card harvesting in mind," he wrote. "Affected users should change their password to a secure one as soon as possible."
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed the attack and said the company had reset the passwords of the compromised accounts and removed the "spammy updates." "Today we discovered about 750 Twitter accounts were broken into and had a link to a webcam site posted on the accounts," he wrote on his blog. It appears other sites and services have been affected by a similar attack.
Stone urged people to use strong passwords for their Twitter accounts and not to share passwords with anyone.
Twitter fended off a series of clickjacking attempts last month in which users were tricked into sending out spam tweets.
. Updated 4:25 p.m. PST with Twitter comment.