How to improve your Twitter security and privacy

If you are a Twitter user you may be interested in knowing how to make your Twitter use more secure. Louisa Hardwick from Sophos has wrapped up a nice blog post writing about how to make Twitter use more secure by adjusting Twitter security and privacy settings. The blog post can be viewed here:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/08/26/how-to-improve-your-twitter-security-and-privacy/

New Twitter Worm Redirects To Rogue AV

Nicolas Brulez, Kaspersky Lab malware researcher, warns about new Twitter worm that's currently abusing Google's goo.gl redirection service to push surfers via chain of redirections to rogue AV site. Technical details and other related information can be read from correspondent Securelist blog entry.

"MouseOver" Security Flaw On Twitter

"A new Twitter security flaw has been widely exploited on thousands of Twitter accounts, redirecting users to third-party websites without their consent.

The bug is particularly nasty because it works on mouseover only, meaning pop-ups and third-party websites can open even if you just move your mouse over the offending link.

For now, the best course of action is using only third-party apps such as TweetDeck to access Twitter, as the bug only seems to affect Twitter’s web interface."

More information > http://mashable.com/2010/09/21/twitter-mouseover-bug/

Twitter Account Used As Botnet Command Channel

Microblogging service Twitter has been one of the hottest topic for the past couple of weeks due to attacks putting more traffic than it could handle towards the service. Jose Nazario, the manager of security research at Arbor Networks made the latest add to Twitter related news by telling in the company's blog how he noticed Twitter account "upd4t3" (now suspended) been used to send commands to botnet of infected computers.

More details in Arbor Networks' blog.

Twitter Suspending Malware Affected Accounts

Twitter has released a status message in which they state that they are suspending a number of accounts that have been affected by malware. Users of compromised accounts will be sent instructions how to restore access.

Reason behind this suspending appears to be Koobface variant and hacked accounts in general, states Mashable, which received following response to their inquiry about the compromised Twitter accounts:
“Unfortunately, it appears to be a number of groups working together; some phished accounts, a sprinkling of hacked accounts — but a large percentage of accounts affected appear to have a Koobface/Win32 variant. We’re attempting to identify the precise variants affecting these folks but have been pushing out notifications to those affected as is.”

Rogue Software Campaigned In Twitter

PandaLabs write in their blog about rogue software campaigns that cyber-criminals are having in Twitter. In the attack, criminals are using zombie Twitter accounts to post messages with url links included. Clicking these links starts a series of redirections that finally ends up to malware serving websites.

Yesterday, all links were posted in messages under "PhishTube Broadcast" topic. However, new PandaLabs' blog entry states that over the past 24 hours the Twitter trends based attack has expanded to several thousand tweets targeting trendy topics on Twitter and the figures keep rising.

Twitter Warns About Phishing

Twitter warns its users about direct messages and direct message email notifications that redirects to what looks like Twitter.com and which criminals are using trying to steal users' usernames and passwords.

Scam message says something like "hey! check out this funny blog about you..." and provides a link. That link redirects to a site masquerading as the Twitter front page.

Twitter tells that it's proactively resetting the passwords of the accounts.

Malware Spread Through Twitter Profile

Security company Kaspersky reports in its Analyst's Diary about an attack that is targeting both social networking service provider Twitter's users and whole internet community at large. A malicious Twitter profile with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’, has a photo with malware advertisement of a fake video. Profile contains no other data than the photo with a link to the video making it look obvious that the profile has been created to infect users.

Clicking on the link will open a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. This technique is currently very popular and the file is actually a Trojan downloader that proceeds to download more files onto the infected machine, all of which are disguised as MP3 files. The downloader is labeled as Heur.Downloader and Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Banload.sco by Kaspersky.

The footprints of this particular crime are pure Brazilian, ranging from the Portuguese, to the web servers hosting the malware to the email embedded in the malware which is used for receiving data from infected machines.

This technique does not require any serious programming skills and Google indexes un-protected Twitter profiles, so malicious pages built and marketed with good social engineering tactics end up high in the rankings.

Twitter suffers also from a vulnerability which allows an attacker to make user follow him automatically. Twitter has partially fixed the vulnerability on the 1st of August 2008 but it can still be exploited on Internet Explorer web browser.