7 High-Tech Twitter Users Who Fell For Phishing Scams
Twitter's default URL shortening service Bit.ly announced steps today to stop phishing and malware attacks from being passed around online through its service. If effective, the effort should help a whole lot of people save face and prevent those moments of panic when you're afraid you may have lost access to your Twitter account forever.
Really, though, people who take tech seriously don't fall for those kinds of things, right? Wrong! Below we offer the job titles of some of the most surprising people we've received phishing direct messages from over the last several months. It's a pretty surprising list.
May this serve as a memorial and a reminder that when new communication media emerge - even the most savvy people can get on board and fall for the oldest tricks in the book.
Remember also, this could happen to any of us (apparently, perhaps) and thus the old saying "there, but for the grace of the Fail Whale, go I."
"I made $300 today with http://ifortune4u.com" - and assorted variations...
Bio: Market analyst following datacenters, energy efficiency, and blade servers.
That's complicated stuff but probably pretty mechanical. No wonder a little human-engineering was able to overcome this person's defenses.
Bio: Enterprise Comms Analyst
That's Comms as in communications?
Bio: Industry analyst: enterprise communications [Different person, same analyst firm as the above]
Oops. Why are these analysts, some of whom charge up to $1000 per hour for their work, falling for a scam that promises relatively small sums of money?
Bio: Consultant in large scale data warehousing.
Looks like just a little bit of your data just got warehoused!
Bio: Strategy planning at [Giant European Firm] Enterprise Communications
How's this for an enterprise strategy? Know a phishing scam when you see one.
Bio: Customer Interaction Analyst at [Giant Marketing Research and Analyst Firm] / Speech Reco and UI Geek / Trendspotter
Oh my...
Bio: an investor and co-founder of [common web 2.0 term].com; a founding partner and Vice-President in [big Web 1.0 company]...8 million page-views and 1 million unique visitors per month...with zero marketing budget.
Surely there were people pulling scams like this back when you were...building a website with 8m monthly pageviews...with zero marketing budget...
Want to brush up on your social networking skills, so you can stay off of lists like this? Check out Sarah Perez's post from October How to Avoid Malware on Facebook and Twitter: 8 Best Practicies.
You can find the whole ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter here. You can follow us with the knowledge that we aren't going to spam you with scammy Direct Messages - or at least if we do you can write a blog post teasing us about it.
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I am glad that they are working out the bugs on phishing scams..twitter is very popular and it should be protected against malicious people.
WoW! Thanks for the Entry..
Agree!
Many Embarrassing Situations took place with Me Regarding Emerging Technologies :)
I thought I was the Only one, but after Reading this entry - My Self Confidence is UP Right Now :)
I am happy to know that the bugs and glitches are being removed from the site. It is very necessary to keep twitter away from malicious activity as it is the most popular site and is a social platform to useful information.
I tend to only click on links from people I trust. Common sense really.
If you're careful with your card details, there shouldn't be any reason that phishing scams work. If we all pulled together on this, potentially phishing scams would become extinct.
I didn't realize I needed permission, but thanks!!!
A. I would actually expect it and
B. Why didn't you take the opportunity to educate people on diff between password vs API Keys?!
I'm very disappointed in you Marshall; part of the news is providing information to educate people and as an editor you've been given a lucky chance to do so.
URLs shortened by services like tr.im and tinyurl are to be regarded (and their links followed) with wariness.
Given how these services work, it shouldn't be hard to return an HTML page stating the URL and giving you several seconds to confirm that you want to download from there. If one service took to doing that, it could gain competitive advantage by being the preferred URL-shortening service for careful people. If that stops browsers from displaying images, those using shortened URLs in IMG tags should put the full URL in.
What this article doesn't say is what was at the other end of the URL. Did the shortened URL refer to a binary, an HTML page or something else like a Flash animation? Were there security warnings from the browser?
If you see a mail about a stupid scam, curiosity might compel you to read further, just to gauge how stupid it is. Is it that streetwise-nature that makes "net-savvy users" follow dangerous links?
I tend to only click on links from people I trust. Common sense really.
why is it so hard to find understandable language in forums?
if somebody trys to steal my identidy why isnt there
ip adress barred from entrance to the web?
I think these changes are becomming necessary for twitter to be alive and function... and who wnats nasty viruses through twitter!!