Twitter

Rarely does a week go by without Twitter being at the centre of a media furore over posts purportedly breaking the law and landing users in hot water. Last year, Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs’ name was all over the social media network, despite a legal ruling granting him anonymity in a case alleging he had an affair with former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas. More recently, a new low was reached when the woman raped by Sheffield United footballer Ched Evans was named on Twitter, despite the anonymity of rape victims being protected by statute. 

Usernames and passwords of Twitter members using file-sharing application TweetGif have been leaked to the internet by a group of hackers claiming to have risen from the ashes of disbanded hacker group LulzSec. 

“LulzSec Reborn” spilled around 10,000 personal details of TweetGif users - including real names and locations.

Anonymous hacktivists are in the midst of a campaign to name and shame suspected pedophiles who allegedly use Twitter to prey on and harass underage children.

Named #TwitterPedoRing, the operation began yesterday (June 4), and has already seen data dumps of hundreds of Twitter accounts that Anonymous followers believe belong to pedophiles.

Twitter has taken a deeper look into how quickly its users change the terms or phrases they tweet on a given topic, or their churn rate, and released some of this data today. 

For example, when Steve Jobs passed away, people began rapidly including "Steve Jobs" in their tweets, but a short while later "Apple" began trending, then "Pixar," and finally "Stay foolish."

Twitter will be implementing the Do Not Track feature in the Mozilla Firefox browser, as announced Thursday by Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission at a New York Internet Week privacy panel. Twitter confirmed the FTC's announcement, appropriately enough, in a tweet.

Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said, "We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track."

The Internet isn't a law-free zone, the U.K. government's top law officer warned Twitter users Friday, adding that he wouldn't hesitate to take action over offending posts.

Attorney General Dominic Grieve, the government's chief legal advisor in England and Wales, spoke out following a series of high-profile court cases involving postings made on the microblogging site.

Hackers purportedly affiliated with the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed this week to have accessed and published the details of about 55,000 Twitter accounts.

But Twitter said those claims are largely bogus, and that the group mostly posted duplicate information or username and password information for suspended spam accounts.

Scammers have launched a campaign preying on users of OpenID in an attempt to steal log-in credentials, according to Barracuda Labs.

Barracuda security researchers Dave Michmerhuizen and Luis Chapetti say they are seeing specially built log-in pages that appear similar to pages used as part of the OpenID authentication process. When users type in their credentials, the data is collected by a rogue website, which sends back a message that the credentials have been validated.

Kasperksy today discovered a new spam campaign on Twitter pushing fake antivirus software. Since it is still ongoing, the numbers for it are likely much higher than what the security firm first reported: 540 compromised Twitter accounts sent out 4148 tweets, linking to a total of 44 unique domains (most of them hosted on .tk and .tw1.su).

A quick search on Twitter shows that the scam is still rampant. Here are a handful of tweets I saw while writing this article, to give you an idea of what the spam looks like:

Twitter took down its popular web version of TweetDeck after an Australian Twitter user found a way to gain access to hundres of Twitter and Facebook accounts through the Mac client app for TweetDeck.