Are Twitter users becoming porn stars?

Davey Winder
Saturday, 07 March 2009 08:51

Your IT - Home IT

Twitter is often accused of being boring, but this weekend many users were discovering their online friends had apparently started a new career as online porn stars.

Pretty much the most exciting thing to happen on Twitter of late was a celebrity getting stuck in a lift. But it is the very normality of Twitter messages that has created such a mass market appeal.

Micro-blogging is, without doubt, the flavour of the month. The ability to get an insight into the lives of friends, family and celebrities has propelled the 140 character social network to the heights of media stardom.

However, Tweets being sent out on Friday which suggested that followers "Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here" and pointed to a pornographic sex-webcam site were out of character for some 750 Twitter users.

Not least because they did not send them. Much to the disappointment of many of their followers,  they had not turned into porn stars after all. Their accounts had been hacked.

Twitter founder Biz Stone has confirms that 750 accounts were broken into and compromised with these porn spam messages being sent out. "We reset the passwords of the compromised accounts and removed the spammy updates" he says.

Unlike other recent Twitter hacks which involved fake messages being posted from genuine accounts suggesting pop stars had teeth bearing private parts and TV news anchormen were high on crack, there is nothing even vaguely amusing about this latest attack.
 
Indeed, as security experts are now reporting the link that the Tweets point to serves up obfuscated Javascript code that loads pornographic adverts by the bucket load.

A very similar attack has already hit both MSN Messenger and Facebook in recent weeks, and some researchers are warning that the linked webcam site "looks to have been designed with credit card harvesting in mind."