Every popular website is a potential target of scammers, hackers, spammers and all the other bandits of World Wide Web. There’s no surprise that the Twitter, fast growing microblogging website, got hackers attention. They created a scheme to lure Twitter users into downloading malware voluntarily.
The problem of Twitter profiles is the advantage of the website at the same time: the profiles are visible for everyone and they are even indexed by Google web search. What wrong with this? Full accessibility to every profile wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t fake profiles. Hackers made a smart strategy to attract people. They create fake Twitter profiles, usually in the Portuguese language, and leave those empty except for a single link. The link promises some naughty girl video; needless to say, many readers are interested in seeing some beauty. Fortunately, computers are not infected when users simply click the link, so people have some time to recognize the scam.
Once user clicks the link that supposedly leads to erotic video, he is offered fake Adobe Flash update needed to watch the video. If victim can’t recognize the fraud and agrees to download an update, he actually gets several trojans masked as MP3 files.
As Twitter profiles are indexed by Google, fake profiles appear on various search results. Being quite appealing the fake ones appear high, therefore attract more visitors and then appear even higher.
