14 DAY TRIAL // The Twitter account of the health advice and information service was taken over by hackers in the effort of promoting a so-called Acai Berry miracle diet.
Graham Cluley tipped us on the scheme that's designed to dupe unsuspecting users into buying a suspicious medical product.
Not only that the message about the diet came from a trusted company, but when the link was clicked, it took the internaut to a page that looks to be a genuine article written by a famous correspondent from News 3.
“It seems our Twitter account was hacked last night. Please ignore the spam! Apologies,” read a tweet after the incident.
Some further digging on the matter of these pills revealed a lot of websites hosted on all sorts of blogs and sites, but in the end they all take the user to a Russian domain that claims all the media recommends their weight loss products.
Twitter accounts have been targeted a lot lately, as cybercriminals noticed that if people receive messages from the individuals or companies they follow, they are more likely to click on the links embedded in the post.
In most cases, the masterminds obtain the credentials by launching a clever phishing campaign. Another likely scenario is based on the fact that we don't set different usernames and passwords for our online assets and once a hacker gets the log-in information for a certain site, they use it to access our social media.
Stay on alert for phishing scams, don't trust any email received from companies you haven't collaborated with and most of all don't trust anything you've read on the internet. A serious organization would never force advertise something if it was as good as they claim.
If you've been the victim of such an online scam, make sure you do a complete system scan with an updated anti-virus solution, as you never know what else might have been contained in the “miracle package”.