Sexy spammers are stalking me on Twitter

by Graham Cluley on October 15, 2008 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Social networks, Spam

I'm using Twitter to syndicate my blog to people who prefer to use that way to follow the latest breaking news from my (rather untidy) desk. A while back I invited folks to follow me - and thanks to those of you who have.

Well, thanks to some of you at least.

Because this morning, I noticed a few more people had decided to stalk follow me, but their intentions may not be entirely honourable.

Spammers promoting websites via Twitter

What connects these three new followers of my Twitterings? Well, they're all young, female, brunettes. There is a fair bit of pouting going on too. What else? They're all new to Twitter (or at least have only ever made one post), and they're all - curiously - encouraging people to go and check out videos of them with an alluring smiley.

I asked the guys in our labs to look at the urls that my new harem are pointing to, and - sure enough - it appears that this is a spam operation. The links redirect to different sites depending on which part of the world you are living in when you click on them.

So, for instance, at the moment if you click on one of these links and the site determines you are living in Canada you are directed to a sexy dating website.

Dating website promoted by spam

Hmm.. maybe we should all feel pleased that spammers are resorting to using networks like Twitter to try and increase hits as it suggests that old-fashioned email isn't working for them so well. Sorry ladies, your spicy websites are not for me.

Update: Thanks to blog reader and fellow Twitterer David who told me that users of the service can report spam via @spam.

By the way, as Vanja posted over on the SophosLabs blog, our analysts have just added a SophosLabs channel for you to follow. Check it out at http://www.twitter.com/SophosLabs.

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About the author

Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.