If you follow @WebSpy on Twitter, you would have received a very strange Direct Message (DM) from us yesterday. Something along the lines of “rofl this you?” or “you’re on this vid!” or “I found you on here!”

Unfortunately, the WebSpy Twitter account fell victim to a phishing scam, and as a result sent phishing spam to all our Twitter followers. We are embarrassed by the incident and we apologize to all of our followers, especially the ones that clicked the link in the DM and were caught by the phishing scam themselves.

Here’s a rundown of the event in the hope that it will help others know what to look out for.

What Happened?

The phishing scam works like this:

1. You receive a strange yet intriguing Direct Message from someone you follow and likely trust. This is the key element to the scams success.
2. The DM contains a link using a shortened URL such as dwarfurl.com/blah. In our case, most of them were using dwarfurl.com, wapurl.co.uk, and 3.ly
3. You click the link and get taken to what appears to be the Twitter login page. But if you look at the URL it is actually something like blogs.videos.dsfasdc.com or videos.twitter.dsfasdc.com. Checking the URL is the key to making sure the scam doesn’t get you too!
4. You enter your Twitter login details. Reports of what happens after this login page vary. You may see the Twitter fail whale, or a blank page, or a random blog.
5. Now that the phishing site has your login details, the same Direct Messages is sent to all your Twitter contacts.
6. You eventually discover what happened. You feel like a violated idiot and start scrambling to fix everything.

What to do if it happens to you

If the above sounds familiar, you need to login to Twitter right now and change your password to make sure the phishing site can no longer access your account. You also need to go to the Connections tab and disable any third party applications that look suspicious. You’ll then need to update the credentials in all the twitter clients, website/blog plug-ins, and anything else that may be using your old Twitter credentials.

Fortunately, we were still able to login to our Twitter account and change our password and disable third party connections. Thankfully there were not any new suspicious connections that we needed to worry about.

Lessons Learned

Now that we’ve fixed everything and regained control of our Twitter account, it’s good to sit back and reflect on what just happened and how to avoid it in the future.

You’ve probably heard all of this before. We had too. But it takes an incident like this to really think about and address any shortfalls in your own organization. Some of our followers were also caught out by the scam and these are people that are in the tech industry and generally know about these sorts of scams. We were definitely surprised that we fell for it! So take a moment of your time to imagine your own Twitter account was compromised in the same way, then imagine all the possible ways it could have happened. Now go and take every precaution to ensure it doesn’t happen.

Having now been through it, here are some tips to help you avoid the same fate in the future.

1. Just because a Direct Message comes from someone you trust, does not mean it is trustworthy. Always use caution!
2. Educate your employees – especially those that know your company’s Twitter credentials. The main goal you want to achieve here is getting your employees into the habit of glancing at the URL in the address bar of their browser before entering ANY login details. We used our own log analysis software (Vantage) to find out who ended up on the websites in question, and then spoke to them directly to ensure they understood what to look out for.
3. Use a Twitter application that can display the actual URL behind a shortened URL before clicking on the link. For TweetDeck users, go to Settings | General, and check ‘Show preview information for short URLs’. Please note, however that this function only works for a few specific URL shortening services.
4. If you’re using the Twitter web page directly, use a browser and plug-in that can expand shortened URLs such as Mozilla Firefox with Long URL Please.
5. Use a browser with integrated anti-phishing security (such as Firefox or Google Chrome) and keep it up to date, or ensure you have good third party anti-phishing / anti-malware software installed.
6. As always, keep your security software and OS up to date.

Our friends at Sophos also have some good information about the scam that you may like to read: http://www.sophos.com/blogs/sophoslabs/?p=7366

Sorry!

An event like this makes you realize how important Twitter is to the overall public perception of a company. Our followers trust us to deliver relevant and useful content about our key areas of expertise – log file analysis and reporting. We spend a large amount of effort researching and writing content to ensure our tweets provide our followers with a good source of information. Having a breach like this certainly degrades this public perception that we work so hard at trying to maintain.

I would therefore like to thank all our followers who have kept with us and not clicked the ‘Unfollow’ button. Now that everything is under control again we will continue to bring you the best content we can provide about the log analysis and surrounding industries.

Once again, many many apologies to all of our followers, especially those that were affected.

See also:

• How to Educate your Workforce and Strengthen Security with Internet Monitoring
• Twitter Evolution Infographic and Amazing Usage Statistics
• Social Media – The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution?
• 5 Top Tips for Safer Social Networking
• Web Module: Assigning Permissions