Spammers post messages to advertise a “miracle” weight loss product

Mar 17, 2014 08:55 GMT  ·  By

The official Twitter account of Jane Garvey, the British radio presenter who currently hosts BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour program, has been hijacked. The attacker abused the 27,000 follower account to lure users to a shady diet website.

The hackers posted a tweet advertising a weight-loss program allegedly recommended by Dr. Oz. The website that the link points to replicates the Women’s Health site and displays an article about a “miracle” diet.

The website in question has been advertised via hijacked Twitter accounts for quite some time now.

“This is real now. I would never tweet about weight loss at 3.30am on a Monday morning. i'm always out at that time anyway,” Garvey tweeted after recovering her account.

However, she still hasn’t removed the spammy tweet. The BBC Woman’s Hour Twitter account has also posted an alert to warn users about the hack attack.

It’s still uncertain how the hackers have managed to compromise the radio host’s account. However, the most likely scenarios are that she has either entered her Twitter credentials on a phishing site, or she granted permissions to a malicious app.

Celebrities often fall victim to spammers. Miracle diet spam is often advertised via Twitter from compromised accounts. However, the cybercrooks target the accounts of celebrities because a tweet about a diet coming from a famous person likely attracts more victims.