Twitter hit by spam wave

Twitter has been in the news the past few days, and it’s not been pretty. On Wednesday, the Mashable blog reported that scads of Twitter accounts were seen sending out Twitter spam with URL links all at once. The spam was not being generated by run-of-the-mill spam accounts that were created just for the purpose of disseminating spam, but rather, they were regular accounts that had obviously been hijacked. Spammy tweets had been going out by the hundreds, making it appear to many people that their friends were recommending a get-rich-quick scheme, which of course, they were not.

There has been very little news about the Twitter spam attack other than the one notice on Mashable, which has been circulated far and wide. Twitter’s own blog hasn’t said anything about it–but then again, the past day, Twitter has been hard to find, since it got hit by a denial-of-service attack yesterday and the site went down. There may be no connection between the denial-of-service attack and the wave of spam–Twitter is after all, what you might call an “attractive nuisance” that attracts all kinds of evil-doers.

Given these recent attacks, one asks should Twitter be allowed in the workplace? There’s no clear answer, except for “it depends.” Marketing people use it to good advantage to keep partners and customers informed. But one thing’s clear, workers need to be informed of the potential risks. Already, there have been many cases of malicious Twitter spam that contains links to nasty web sites that contain malware that could infect the computer or the entire network. Follow Twitter links at your own risk. This is especially dangerous as Twitter uses the abbreviated URLs, making it difficult to tell whether you’re being sent to a legitimate site.

This isn’t the first time compromised Twitter accounts have been used to send out spam. Just a few months ago in March, 750 accounts were hijacked to send links to porn sites.  And the spammers are on top of Twitter, and they’re apparently promoting its use at “Spam University,” or wherever it is they go to learn their trade. There are already commercial Twitter spamming tools out that can generate bogus Twitter accounts automatically for sending out ads.