Osama-Themed Scams Spreading on Twitter

Following black hat SEO campaigns and Facebook scams, Osama-themed attacks have extended to Twitter where links to videos of his death lead to malware.

Security researchers from Kaspersky have monitored bin Laden's death coverage on Twitter and during the past 24 hours the number of related tweets averaged at 4,000 per second.

Many of these tweets contained URLs and some of them were malicious. For example, in one case, they led to Facebook scam pages.

"We have found this link being distributed in several tweets, especially among Brazilian users," says Kaspersky Lab expert Vicente Diaz.

Another campaign uses @username replies to spam people with shortened bit.ly links. "#osama binladem Video ---> http://bit.ly/[removed]" the rogue messages read.

In order to fly under the radar, this spam run changes topics. Later tweets claim that a Justin Bieber ft. Bruno Mars video was banned.

"When you follow the URL, the destination page poses as a Youtube video. In this case instead of asking the victim to download a binary, when clicking the button a new malicious tweet will be created in the victim´s account, 'replicating' itself," Mr. Diaz explains.

It's not clear if this is achieved via clickjacking, a method that allows attackers to hijack user clicks and use them to perform unauthorized actions. The page also contains ads from Google in an attempt to monetize the traffic drawn to it.

As always, cyber criminals will not miss any chance to exploit a topic that attracts a lot of public interest. Because of this users are urged to only obtain their news and related footage from well known sources.

Avoiding clicking on links included in unsolicited messages and running an up-to-date antivirus program at all times is also critically important.