Online security firm F-Secure reports that the latest wave of malicious spam to hit Twitter could be aimed at laying the groundwork for a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.
The "this you???" campaign sends private messages to Twitter users and can compromise their account details. Successfully hacked accounts are then used to post content that could show up in Google’s real-time search results and redirect unsuspecting searchers to scareware sites, where they will be told that their computer is full of viruses and that the only way to fix the problem is to purchase bogus anti-virus software.
F-Secure and other researchers note that Twitter spam is a relatively common phenomenon. Yet the malicious nature of the "this you???" campaign is such that it may pose a greater threat to the security of web-goers than any such attack seen thus far.
Experts say that scareware has rapidly become one of the primary money-making venues for cyber criminals over the past several months, and that the black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques used to push malicious links have grown rapidly in sophistication.
