Web security trend: The Twitter effect
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Spammers and cybercriminals have been picking up on the explosive popularity of Twitter to spread malicious files, exploiting the trending topics on the site to insert links to websites hosting malware.
Since early June, Twitter's search function has been the focus of cyberattacks that take advantage of shortened URLs popular in Twitter posts to disguise malicious links. According to email security service MessageLabs, spammers have caught on and the use of URL shorteners to create malicious links in spam email has exploded in recent weeks.
BlackHat SEO tactics target popular news stories such as celebrity deaths to spread malicious links via Twitter, according to security firm PandaLabs. When the actor David Carradine died, there were hundreds of malicious tweets in just a few hours, the firm said.
Twitter's security bugs prompted researcher Aviv Raff to declare July as the "Month of Twitter Bugs." Raff posts a new Twitter bug on his blog, twitpwn.com, every day of the month.
Raff identified a flaw on the popular Twitpic service, which allows users to post photos to their Twitter accounts. Because twitpic.com failed to sanitize and encode HTML tags in the profile information, a hacker could inject scripts to the Twitpic user profile page, Raff explained.
Twitpic fixed the flaw, but in late June, the Twitpic accounts of Britney Spears and other celebrities were hacked.
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