Stop Twitter Spam

Earlier this afternoon, a number of Twitter users got their accounts hacked. The hacker took control of their accounts and sent out a tweet plugging diet pills. It’s unclear exactly how the hacker took control of the accounts. The hijacked tweet looked like this:

It doesn’t appear that any other damage has been done to the accounts. This the second attack of this kind in the past month or so. The last attack was the StalkDaily worm, which occurred over the weekend of April 11th. As of 8:30 PM PST there has been no official response from Twitter about this attack. If you’ve been victimized, make sure to change your password immediately and make sure that your new password is strong.

Here’s a sampling of people reacting to their Twitter accounts getting attacked.

Here’re some tips on how to make sure you have a secure password to begin with: http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-a-Secure-Password

May 26th Update:
Twitter provided  this update on the Twitter Status blog:

We are currently pushing a password reset on accounts we believe may have been caught in a phishing scam. Please exercise your best judgment when thinking about releasing your username and password to third parties.

Here’re some tips on how to make sure you have a secure password to begin with: http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-a-Secure-Password

Multi-level-marketing has invaded Twitter.  Mashable and Silicon Angle have good coverage of this ugly trend.

• Mashable: Enough Already: MLM Invades Twitter’s Trending Topics
• Silicon Angle: Twitter Succumbs to Marketer Attack [Toldja So]

This is from an interesting interview with the founder of What the Trend, a site that provides explanations for the top trends on Twitter.

Media Guy: Let’s talk for a moment about twam, or Twitter spam — the way that spammers and scammers have been inserting trending terms into their tweets so that when people search on those trends, they’re exposed to off-topic spammy tweets. What should Twitter be doing to address that?

Mr. Mayer: What the Trend has recently also become the target of spam attacks. I recently spent 30 minutes, after a spam attack, hacking together an administrative tool to allow me to revert spam posting more easily. When my tool was ready, I went to delete the spam — and it had already gone! Confused, I checked the logs. Other visitors had already manually replaced the spam with more useful explanations. It’s the Wikipedia Effect at work. Provided you make it easy for the “good guys” to clean up after any “bad guys,” the community can work together to minimize the effect of spam. Now that Twitter trends have a more prominent position in the Twitter interface, the temptation to spammers grows. Twitter needs to find some way to leverage community feedback to not only quickly remove trends which are identified as spam, but also display more relevant tweets when people search on a trend.

- Advertising Age: The Twuth About Twitter Twends

One of the most powerful features of Twitter is Trending Topics, which shows the topics that are popular on Twitter right now.  The visibility of Trending Topics was greatly expanded a little over a month ago when it was added to the main Twitter.com page along with the ability to search.  But there’s a problem.  Opportunistic spammers have discovered that the trending topics pages get a lot of page views.  To take advantage of this, they’re starting to load up tweets with the trending topics.  For example, here’s a screenshot showing a tweet that includes two current trending topics: Star Trek and Dollhouse.

But the tweet includes a link that has absolutely nothing to do with those topics.  Twitter will need to get a handle on this soon because or else Trending Topics will become a wasteland of spam links. What can you do to help? If you see someone littering the Trending Topics with spam, report them to @spam.

We’ve been waiting a long time for improvements to Twitter’s New Follower email.  Some people got tired of waiting and started using third-party notification services such as Topify.  I’m happy to report that Twitter has just rolled out a new & improved version of this email.  It’s not perfect yet but it’s a definitely a huge step forward.

Here’s the old version of the New Follower email.

As you can see, the information was limited and you had to click through to the profile to see useful information such as the profile photo, following/following stats, and number of updates.

Here’s the new version.

It looks much better and now you can get a pretty good feel for who the new follower is without having to click through to their profile.  I really like that you can block spammers directly from the email.  I’d also like to see a few other things: Bio text, location, a Follow link, the last 5 tweets, the tweet frequency (e.g. 7 tweets per day), and how long the person has been on Twitter.

Update:

@TwitSpamOrg points out that the User ID of the new follower is not shown very prominently in the new version of the email.  This makes it harder to spot people who are impersonating other people on Twitter.  Hopefully they’ll add this back in.