Just picked up on a warning via Mashable that 1000s of Twitter profiles appear to have been compromised in the latest attack of spam messages on the microblogging platform.
The attacks seem to be producing waves of spam messages, with hundreds of tweets, and then stopping for a while before starting again. The cause hasn’t been identified and the Twitter team have been informed.
Luckily in this case, the url in question hasn’t been masked with a shortening service, so don’t go to high-profits.org unless you fancy risking your account.
If your account has been compromised, change your password immediately etc…
And finally, think about how you might be affected – is the risk of spam and phishing scams a natural balance to adding 1000s of follows and followers that you don’t know, in order to boost your popularity?
Do you RT without checking links first? Click on links from people you haven’t established any reputation with?
I’m not saying close contacts can’t make a mistake and have their account hacked or phished – it’s happened to several friends with online email accounts – but commons sense and building trusted relationships will definitely lessen the odds of you being affected…