Viral Twitter App Outlines Why Spammers Are Still Successful

Thousands of Twitter users, including high-ranking officials from top companies like Google or Cisco failed to read the fine print and gave a questionable application access to post messages from their profile.

An application developed by a Scottish teenager took Twitter by storm yesterday after it began advertising itself through the profiles of thousands of users, who misguidedly gave it access to their accounts.

Dubbed Twifficiency, the app created by 17-year old James Cunningham (@jamescun) is supposed to calculate a user's Twitter efficiency score by following a special algorithm, which takes into account follower and following numbers, as well as tweet frequency and other parameters.

It doesn't seem that the resulting metric is either accurate or significant, but that's not the main problem people had with the application.

Instead, everyone were outraged when it started tweeting "My Twifficiency score is #%. What’s yours? http://twifficiency.com/" from their accounts.

This despite a message in fine print, but colored in red, on the application's page which states that "Twifficiency will tweet your score on your behalf. Do not use this app if you do not consent to this."

It seems that most people did not bother reading the warning and this is worrying, especially since the pseudo-victims include people like Google's Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer or Cisco's Chief Technology Officer, Padmasree Warrior.

The whole incident raises a very serious question – if highly technical people like Ms. Mayer and Ms. Warrior fell for Twifficiency, what chances do regular users have to stay clear of even the most basic social engineering threats.

In all fairness, the Google VP and Cisco CTO are probably not only high-profile executives to have granted Twifficiency access to their profile, but they were the ones many users pointed out.