It seems that Twitter is becoming a major new playground for spammers and malware authors keen to target social networking users. Today we are seeing a new series of messages being posted to the streams of hundreds of unsuspecting Twitterers:

You'll like this one! Check out www.TheSmartEcard.com

and

Retweet: You'll love this one! Check out www.TheSmartEcard.com

Note that the "retweet" isn't really a retweet as it says "love" whereas all the original messages seen so far say "like".

Twitter's security department have described the problem as a "scam/phishing site" rather than a virus problem.

Hopefully it should be obvious from the website's opening page of legalese banning staff from Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, that something odd is afoot - even before it starts to quiz you for personal information. But if not, let me just say that visiting the website is not recommended.

Anyone who has passed on their credentials to a third party website like TheSmartECard would be wise to change their passwords at the earliest opportunity.