The Twitter σαν πλατφόρμα ανταλλαγής μηνυμάτων είναι ένας σημαντικός στόχος για τους εγκληματίες του κυβερνοχώρου, και σύμφωνα με την εταιρεία security TrendMicro there are more than 20.000 accounts used in phishing campaigns and sending malicious links.
The system is simple, targets unsuspecting users and points them to fake Twitter-like pages to login.
After hacking an account, criminals begin to send messages to the victim's friends, prompting them to click on a link that links to a phishing page. The malicious address loads a dummy Twitter login page, creating the impression that the user has been disconnected for some reason.
The candidate victim tries to reconnect, but all information is sent directly to the fraudsters.
Security firm TrendMicro observed this phishing scheme over a three-month period from March 2014, XNUMX onwards. The Results of their research report that, on peak days, fraudsters used more than 20.000 accounts to send malicious links to over 13.000 separate addresses.
22.282 accounts were violated on 18 March 2014 and were used to distribute phishing links. One day later, malicious URLs with 23,372 different addresses were sent to 5.148 users.
"Since June, however, Twitter has begun to reduce the volume of malicious links and phishing has dropped significantly," Jon Oliver, a senior TrendLabs executive, said in a post.
Phishing on Twitter is hard to limit
Tracking malicious activity on Twitter is particularly difficult for security researchers because they can not use automated tools that are effective for detecting malware.
Honeypots, sandboxes, and web reputation tools can not capture malicious messages because they are sent by legitimate users and contain abbreviated URLs.
According to the company's research, the largest number of clicks (49%) on phishing links recorded during the three-month study came from the United States, closely followed by Japan, with 15%.
Other countries hit by the fraudsters are Australia (6%), the United Kingdom (5%), Canada (4%), the Philippines, Malaysia, and France with 2% each, Indonesia and the Netherlands with 1% each.
