BANGALORE: In merely 48 hours, over 540 Twitter accounts were compromised globally, claimed a new threat report. Published by Russia-based global international software security company Kaspersky Lab, the threat report states that a new ongoing spam campaign is on the rise and this has led to compromised accounts spamming malicious links, leading to antivirus softwares. The company that noticed the spam attack on April 19, immediately notified the Twitter security team. “Contacting hundreds of Twitter users isn’t possible because of Twitter limitations. However, the attack is quite visible and users realised their accounts were compromised,” explained Nicolas Brulez, Senior Malware Researcher-Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab. The spam attack involved more than 540 compromised Twitter accounts which were sending messages to random Twitter users. “Those messages were advertising an Antivirus solution as well as online virus scanning, with links to the products. Upon following such links, the victims were redirected to a fake anti virus web site, pretending that their computer was infected. They were offered to install an Antivirus solution, which is not a real one. Once installed, the fake scanner begins the spam by pretending the machine is infected with a variety of malwares and asked them to pay a licence in order to clean it,” explained the threat detection team.While the company has still not been able to detect where the spam originated from, they have said that such instances have occurred in the past. “Similar authors of Fake Anti Virus solutions were arrested in Eastern Europe in the past,” Brulez said. The mallicious links were hosted on .TK and .tw1.su domains, leading to Rogue Anti Virus softwares.
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