The Social Media Security Podcast

Welcome to 2009! As many have said…it was just a matter of time before Twitter had a somewhat significant attack…well, here it is! I just had a post up last week about how many of us that use social media just blatantly trust every site that asks us for Twitter credentials. Well if you don’t look at the URL carefully even the security aware could be fooled by this one. Tonight there was a lot of tweets about the following phishing attack….

You will get a DM (direct message) in your email from a user with the following message:

hey! check out this funny blog about you…
hxxp://jannawalitax.blogspot.com

If you click on blogspot link this is basically a redirect to the following fake Twitter site:

Looks just like an identical copy of the real Twitter site except for the URL! (don’t go to this URL…)

About an hour after this started going around Twitter it looked like Firefox 3 picked up that this was a reported phishing site and you now get the following message:

Looks like Twitter and others moved quickly to get the redirect shut down. If ignore the Firefox warning to the blogspot page you get this:

However, the phishing site is still active and will probably be for awhile. Do not enter in any login credentials at any site other then twitter.com. The fake site in this case is twitter.access-logins.com/login. Note that if you take off the “login” at the end of the URL you are sent to a fake Facebook login page! Looks like these guys have been doing this for quite some time.

One interesting note about this attack…how does someone send you a DM without you following them? There was an interesting hack that is documented here that used to work, however…Twitter fixed this a few months ago. My only guess is that multiple hacked accounts were used to send legitimate DM’s. I’m not 100% sure how DM’s are being propagated in this case but it should be interesting to find out how the attack started in the coming days.

Kudos to the Twitter team and all the Twitter users that retweeted and got to word out. This alone hopefully mitigated much of the threat. I even saw in the Twitter web client that @twitter posted a warning message on the page about the threat. Great work Twitter team!

What if you gave your credentials away to this site?
Change your password immediately! Also, do you use this same password for Facebook, Myspace, email and other sites? Change those as well! Give a password manager like 1password or KeePass (KeePass is free BTW) a try to set unique passwords for every site/application you use. That way if your Twitter account did get compromised, your other accounts are safe. See this post for more information.