Category Social Media

You ever wake up to look at your tweet and come across this type of completely insincere DM?

This would be great if my name were infact John, but it isn’t.  And this is sheer spam!

Well, @jesse has taken SocialToo to a new level by taking responsibility to not promote the sending of DM Spam.  As Twitter grows at the exponential rates it is, vehicles to manage this relationship between real sincere users and fake autobots had to be taken somewhere.   I’m glad to see Jesse step up on this issue.   @louisgray has great coverage of this as well, as an advisor to the Socialtoo team and other boards, his knowledge and skill really provides context for these type of situations.

One of the greatest pieces of this, is as Jesse puts it:

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it – it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?“, we’ll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically.

So, if you don’t like to get Auto-DM Spam, whether it WAS from Socialtoo, or from other third party services – subscribing to SocialToo, a responsible social service is the way to go.

I wish you all the best on this, and John you can remove your own Bubble of Spam like this ;)

You ever watch a snowball fall down a hill?

As it collects more snow, it gets bigger it collects more snow and moves faster, and as it moves faster, it collects more snow and gets even bigger.

This is the twitter (and frankly every successful explosive growth resource in the past 2000 years) growth and scale-out model.

Now, imagine for a moment that a snowball had a limited amount of snow it was allowed to collect at a limited speed.   It would continue to grow at a linear rate, linear speed and quite frankly might even stop or MELT at the pace it was moving.   That’s not scale-out, that’s called a collapse and melt methodology.

This not only stifles innovation and integration, but it out right cripples an entire community working at growing at hockey-stick sized projections.   The kind of partner ecosystem which promotes growth and self-innovation is what has brought us ultra-successful business models (take Microsoft for example, heard of them?)

However, what it appears they’re taking in this ultra-conservative approach, with little action on raising the bar will go the route of eBay tactics where the community finds itself hands bound and tied, unable to help grow and scale the business, eventually leaving for other opportunities because this ship has sailed, and sadly sunk.

Check out the Social Too entry on this and perhaps Twitter might do something to stop itself from chopping its own head off.

Excellent! One of my self-infected accounts I created to track this Phishing scam has hit paydirt!

Here is what the tweet will look like:

It brings you to the same type of site, again no malware or spyware executing by visiting there.

By now the site should be in your anti-phishing dialog (Chrome and Firefox caught it, I had to bypsas that to get to the site)

You do have to watch out because the method of distribution of this attack appears to be very SLOW to hit, I’ll see tweets come 2-3 or 15-20 minutes a part from the same account, so be wary of the tweets we’re in for a long night of this infection continuing to spread!

If you have been infected – Change your password, and make sure you haven’t stopped following people.   That’s all I can say for now.  Reference these links for more details on this Phishing Scam on Twitter

Twitter Phishing Scam with Blogspot – Post Mortem

Phishing Scams finally hit Twitter!

Gone Phishing

Alright, in honor of the great successes brought about by Jason Mitchener’s question before, a few more funny blog posts! (It may not be funny, it may simply be ironic what this Worm has done ;))

So on to our question of – Who is Craig Martin?

Which is a pretty good question, he appears to be a traveler and a Kiwi – I love Kiwi’s, especially with Strawberry!  

Well, for one thing by the look of his website he’s a pretty busy guy out wining and dining err wining.

He’s an editor of websites, so I’d suggest checking out his (various) sites, because from his main site alone, wow! Looks good to me! Very structured especially inlight of others trying to do similar and only inducing chaos.   I also think it’s cute how he says “zed” in his little video, not to mention that he has a whole introduction and video going on – while sitting in a beautiful garden!

He’s a traveler, adventurer, Ninja.  Okay, maybe he’s not a traveler, but he is a hardcore ninja, the likes of which you could only counteract with Pirates.

So, be sure to follow @craig_martin and check him out, he’s great and apparently with his following of 666 followers he’s in lieu with the devil so help break him from that habit! ;)

Oh, and he’s very friendly so check him out! :)

What are our lessons learned so far from this little Twitter Phishing Scam?

First of all, this involved infecting a single or single groups of people.

Distribution consisted of Infect a person by sending them to a site to capture their credentials.   Once those usernames and passwords were collected, they would then use those compromised credentials to send this same message (via DM) to their followers, and continue the spread.

If Joe has 10 followers and DM’s it to those 10, and those 10 have 10 followers and DM it to the next 10, shortly you’d have thousands who are redistributing this – So long as they’ve visited the site and entered their credentials to be captured.

I see a lot of anger “I’m going to get person ‘x’ who sent me this message!”

It’s not the fault of the sender, not entirely.   They were compromised by a phishing scam, it happens, you should work towards educating them instead of castrating them.  So next time it will be part of their sense to not transmit their username/password to an untrusted site.

How could this terrible thing have happened? Now I hate (BlogSpot, Twitter, Followers)

Don’t hate the player, just be glad that it WAS done this way (a semi-safe site with only a small portion of cookies which get added to your browser)   Here is what could have happened if it were introduced in an effective ‘distribution manner’.

You visit the site, you are prompted for credentials.  Perhaps you’re prompted for credentials, though the better payload would be in the form of Malware, Spyware, Phishing-ware, Password capturers, and a number of other infection mechanisms.

Once this would be done, you’d be able to compromised on a number of fronts and able to distribute this to millions instead of just the few followers you have – Infecting Facebook, your banking account, etc so on and so forth.

What can I do about this in the future?

The universal rule of communication, especially unsolicited is ask yourself a few questions.   Would you visit this link if you were having a conversation with the person? Having established rapport with them while talking? Yes likely.

However the tip here is – Random “auto-dm’s” does not guarantee a reason to visit their link.  Yes a lot of people DO send out auto-DM’s, to the bane of all of us (SocialToo/ChrisBrogan– Thanks for helping limit that exposure!)  However, don’t bane all communication in the future.   If you think someone seriously DID write a funny blogpost about you because the person knows you, definitely do check it out! But in all seriousness, if you’ve not had some kind of established communication with this person to justify it, and let alone it brings you to not a funny blogpost, but to a fake twitter login page – Be sure to question it and use your common sense here.

Oh, and be wary of ever entering your credentials – again unless you explicitly trust the source.

Hopefully this Post-Mortem helps you deal with this situation, I’m still waiting for my self-infected account to start tweeting out to me (Controlled infection) For every problem there will be people looking to exploit it, and others trying to solve and contain it.   I’ll be there trying to find new solutions and rid the world of future exposure as well :)

Good luck, and feel free to follow me if you like :) @cxi