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Celebrity Bait-and-Switch Twitter Post Leads to Hacker Takeover

by Tim Stevens on August 12, 2008 at 07:15 AM

Be Careful What You TwitterThought Twitter was just innocent (and frequently inane) updates about what your friends and associates? Think again. Enterprising online criminals have apparently started to zero in on the service as a way to distribute their bogus wares.

In this case, an apparently Brazilian Twitterer posted a link to a video purporting to be of a celebrity caught in a private moment. Naturally there was no video, only malicious software to take over your computer.

Clicking on the link prompted you to install what was supposed to be a version of Adobe's Flash, said to be required before you could view the video. The app was actually a fake, turning your machine into a zombie and letting those hackers take it over, use it as part of a distributed denial of service attack. That's a rather less enticing prospect than what was promised, so aren't you glad you don't install whatever websites tell you to? [Source: BBC News]

Tags: hack, hackers, security, social-networking, twitter, zombie

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