Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Twitter Lets Users Fight Back as Phishing Scams Spread

by Terrence O'Brien on October 15, 2009 at 06:34 AM

As Phishing Scams Proliferate Twitter Fights Back
The pool of phishing scams on Twitter is seemingly bottomless. Every time we turn around, there is a new one popping up, or an old one reemerging, or some other unfortunate development that sends us rushing to the presses only to give users the same advice over and over again: Don't click on that link.

The most recent scam comes in the form of a direct message declaring "you're on this vid!" followed by a link. Click the link and you'll be led to a page that looks an awful lot like the login page for Twitter. But don't be fooled. Check that address bar and you'll quickly see that you are not, in fact, on Twitter. If you make the mistake of trying to log into the fake page, your account will be hijacked and used to send the same message to all of your followers.

Thankfully, Twitter has just introduced a new security feature that allows people to report spam accounts. Users have been able to report spam by sending a message to @spam, but the new link, which sits on the right-hand side of profile pages and allows you to "report (fill in the blank) as spam," should make the process easier and much more visible.

One of the biggest complaints we have with Twitter is the sheer volume of spam that floods the service. At least three times a day, we receive a notification saying that someone (or something) is following us, only to uncover the account as spam. Hopefully, the new 'report spam' link will help weed out the offending accounts more quickly, but such annoyances will never go away completely. So continue to exercise caution when clicking on those links in Twitter. [From: Examiner, Mashable, and Twitter]

Tags: phishing, scam, security, spam, top, twitter

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular