14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has fallen victim to a rather large attack on Wednesday as hundreds of accounts were hijacked and used to send malicious messages.
The attack featured messages from people who swear by various methods to lose weight or ways to change their lives.
One message reads “If I didn’t try this my life wouldn’t have changed,” complete with a link. Those unfortunate enough to have clicked on the link were transported to a Women’s Health magazine spoof site that promotes weight loss through the use of one of those miracle pills that keep making their way on the market.
Twitter reacted rather quickly and started warning readers that the link had been flagged as potentially harmful and started displaying the usual warning to those who wanted to access it.
Ars Technica reports that the attack appears to be related to security breaches at third party sites and apps. Since some of the first messages from hijacked accounts included the tag “via weheartit.com,” many speculated that everything had something to do with this particular network.
The site did indeed admit to Ars Technica that it had identified malicious activity on the network and that it was investigating the matter, leading to an eventual disabling of sign-ins and sharing via Tweeter. The company also suggested users use their email addresses to sign-in.
Basically since users can connect their We Heart It accounts to Twitter, when the platform was affected, some of the users started posting the messages on the microblogging site.
“In our ever-connected online world, cyber attacks have become one of the unfortunate realities. Today, We Heart It’s technical team discovered that we were one of several applications impacted by a hacker using connected Twitter accounts to send out falsified Tweets. This attack was reported to have begun several days ago in Australia,” reads a blog post coming from We Heart It.
The company said that only a fraction of the platform’s users were impacted by the “spam” hack and that there were no indications that personal information belonging to users was compromised.
That being said, it probably won’t hurt if you change your password on the platform, especially if you connected any of your other accounts or if you use the same password for multiple accounts.
If the message used in the attack rings a bell, it's because diet-related notes were used for spamming purposes in the recent issues reported by AOL.