Everything is fast on Twitter even been hacked

It all started when I received one DM (direct Message) on my mailbox from a user I was following for less than one week. The message said I had a funny pic on a mysterious site, but when I clicked on the link I was prompted to enter my oginand password. I don't know how many of you detected this phishing, but I never asked myself if it was one. Because this message was sent from one of my follower (and that I follow back), so I place enought trust into this message. Very rapidly, I started to spot tweets about this phishing scam. Too late. For half a day, my account was sending DM to my followers, I then changed my password in order to stop the spread. This could be the end of the story, but it seemed that another phishing scam promising you to win an Iphone started itself to spread. And lately, some major Twitter users had their account hacked too like BarackObama or BritneySpears. So a few hours before I posted this article, my account password was reset again by Twitter this time, I think this reset is deployed to all Twitter-ers.

The moral of the story

Twitter is a fantastic tool for connecting with people, it is fast, it gives you the ability to have a birdseye view of the internet activity and it is easy to chat with your friends. This phishing outbreak has totally took advantage of this fast spreading signal channel, it has exploited the fact that if something comes from a trusted party, it is easily accepted. This is the worse form of phishing. I remember one of my nephew sent me a recommendation about a site "from microsoft" offering some great stuffs, but you had to log in to get it. Well, coming from a relative, I had no reason to doubt, but the person who sent me this was not very experienced Internet user. I trusted him anyway and got phished !

How about Twitter Monetization?

Evans William announced a bunch of monetization feature for Twitter to come by 2009, I wonder if this phishing issue will delay their implementation.