14 DAY TRIAL // A spam attack promoting acai berry diets is quickly spreading on Twitter and apparently it uses hundreds of thousands of accounts hijacked following the Gawker database compromise.
The flood of spam messages began today and are among the lines of "Lost 10lbs using acai berry! RT This! [link]" or "Im not gaining weight this year cuz of acai berry! [link]."
The advertised domains contain "acainews" in their name, but as Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, notes, they could change at any time.
The links take users to an article on a fake a news website, which displays the logos of abc, Fox News, CNN, CBS and USA Today, in order to gain credibility. The goal is to trick visitors into buying weight loss products.
This aggressive spam attack has been linked to a compromise of Gawker user accounts that happened over the weekend.
A group of hackers gained access to the media company's servers and among other things, leaked a database of 1.3 million usernames, passwords and email addresses.
"Got a Gawker acct that shares a PW w/your Twitter acct? Change your Twitter PW. A current attack appears to be due to Gawker compromise," Del Harvey, who leads Twitter's Trust and Safety team, wrote in a tweet.
In a FAQ about the data breach, Gawker stressed that Twitter passwords were not compromised. "We never stored Twitter passwords from users who linked their Twitter accounts with their Gawker Media account," the company said.
"However, if you used the same password for your Twitter account as you did on your Gawker Media account, you should change it immediately," it advised.
Surveys and previous research showed that at least one third of users (conservative estimation) are reusing passwords on different websites. This means that as much as 430,000 users whose Gawker accounts were compromised, might use the same password on Twitter.