14 DAY TRIAL // The news that Jenna-Louise Coleman is about to become part of BBC’s "Doctor Who" series became a popular topic on social media sites. Cybercriminals took advantage of the trending topic and started flooding Twitter with malicious posts.
Sophos experts determined that users who clicked on the links from the shady messages were taken to a site that promoted adult content.
A message displayed on top of the page urged visitors to click on some thumbnails in order to gain access to a number of videos.
The clever thing about this scam is that each of the thumbnails actually hides a Twitter Follow button. Similar to Facebook scams in which victims are urged to Like or Share a malicious post, in this case they are duped into following the rogue accounts.
“Of course, the scammers could just have easily transported you to a webpage containing malware, a survey scam or a rogue application. The point is that you should always be cautious about the links which you click on,” Graham Cluley warns.
Internauts who rely on NoScript browser plugins are protected against these types of clickjacking scams, but that still leaves a large number of individuals exposed.
The latest trend among scammers is to use spam bots to flood hot Twitter topics with their own malevolent tweets.
Since in many cases these tweets advertise prizes or content that may be appealing to many, the number of victims is usually high, especially since it takes Twitter a fairly large amount of time to block the bots.
A few days ago we’ve seen how the #freetibet and #tibet hashtags were overtaken by spam bots and it took the social media company some time to block all of them, even after the rogue accounts were reported.
Users are advised to act with caution when following trended topics because you never know what may hide behind an innocent looking link.
Note. My Twitter account has been erroneously suspended. While this is sorted out, you can contact me via my author profile.