Posted by 
Archived in 
With over 90% of the world’s emails classified as spam, it’s inevitable that scammers will try to infiltrate the latest technology to fill their pockets. Social media services are under increasing attack, with phishers desperate to snare people’s login details.
Last month, Twitter was subjected to a series of outbreaks of phishing emails and direct messages sent to its members. High profile victims included Ed Miliband MP and First Direct, whose hacked accounts were used to advertise dodgy knock-off pills and post links to scammy websites.
This video explains the outbreak in more depth:
Since the outbreak, Twitter’s technicians have been busy in their lab devising a solution. This week they emerged to announce that Twitter would now be screening all links in direct messages and emails to make sure they didn’t send people to fake phishing websites or anywhere else a little iffy.
Twitter has yet to confirm whether it will also start screening links in Tweets as well. But maybe it should – according to a recent study 10% of Twitter traffic is already junk, and it’s only going to rise…
Four Twitter Spam tactics
If you’re a Twitter user you might recognise a few of these by now:
- Profile picture of a pretty girl and endless, moronic Tweets pitching products. The aim of these accounts is to follow as many people as possible so that when users check to see who’s following them they see the spammy messages
- The hijacking of hashtags and popular topics by adding keywords to promotional messages. Habitat faced a PR disaster after it used interest in the Iranian election as an opportunity to flog its latest in-store discounts
- Auto posting Tweets with scraped content to direct people to spammy websites filled with Adsense ads and affiliate links
- Although this isn’t strictly spam, it’s still annoying – accounts with autoresponder messages which ask you to download their eBook or signup for their webinar the moment you start following them
MySpace has already been ruined, for many people, by its abundance of fake accounts and ‘friend’ requests from spammers.
Let’s hope Twitter doesn’t go the same way and steps up its efforts to combat spam. Otherwise it risks the user experience becoming ruined and having to watch its chances of making money fly out of the window.
_______________________________
BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.
