Legal Marketing & PR

Yet Another Twitter Worm

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

According to Nerino Petro's Compujurist.com, As Twitter becomes more popular with lawyers, it becomes a larger target for people with malicious intent to use for their own nefarious purposes. The latest round of attacks has been occurring in the form of a worm which attacks when users click the shortened URLs in a Tweet. 

Ryan Meray of TechNibble said the worm began on May 31 compromising the accounts of people who clicked on a link to a video on the juste.ru domain. These zombified accounts were then used to post another link to the video. 'Best Video: http://juste.ru/?…' tweets began to spread across the twittersphere.

It appears that unlike previous twitter worms, this one doesn't work off of cross-site scripting (XSS) but instead installs some sort of malware to compromise your account details. Further, it appears to be able to grab Facebook login information as well, and it has begun to propagate on that network as well.

There is no defense against this worm. Firefox users have a tool that can be used to expand these shortened URLs before they're clicked but it isn't a cure because you need to know that the URL is in fact beforehand. If you use TweetDeck (or one of the other Twitter readers) as your primary reader, you're out of luck.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on June 01, 2009 (boomark / email).