PR and the Social Web

The Spam attacks that began plaguing twitter users from the end of October last year are back.

Thousands of twitter users accounts are being hacked and in an almost identical scam to last year hackers are using the accounts to send direct messages using phases like “this you?” of with links to sites offering sexual enhancements.

Affected users are the victims of phishing where they have been tricked into giving out passwords to the hackers.  Social media guru Jeremiah Owyang has reported that he is seeing lots of these DMs today.

Effectively the DM function of twitter is being systematically killed off as inboxes are now polluted almost entirely with a combination of spam and auto-DMs thanking users for following.   Somehow twitter needs to get a grip.

Affected users should change the password on their account or go to the connections tab in your twitter settings page and ‘revoke access’ for applications that are listed, particularly any you don’t trust or recognise.