Cybercriminals are using compromised Twitter accounts to distribute messages disguised as coming from friends who suggest recipients click on a link to see themselves on a Facebook video.
Sophos reported the trick after receiving a number of reports from readers of the vendor's blog. The link carried in the direct messages to Twitter users points to a website that tries to install malware onto a PC.
Charlie Miller, a security expert who gained fame highlighting exploits in Apple's Mac and iOS operating systems, has been hired by social networking service Twitter.
Miller announced via his Twitter account on Friday that he starts working at the Twitter security team on Monday.
As the good and the bad gets hashed out over blogs and on news sources in the aftermath of Apple's highly-anticipated debut of the iPhone 5 today, it's interesting to take a look and see what was the public's reaction on social media when the device was released.
Pinterest users are taking to Facebook and Twitter to complain about their hacked accounts, in what appears to be yet another round of spammers attacking the pinboard-style photo sharing site.
In fact, many users are noticing that their friends and followers are pushing Pinterest spam to Facebook (showing up on users’ Timelines and thus friends’ Tickers as well as News Feeds) and Twitter, since users often link the social networks together for cross-posting purposes.
Twitter today renewed its privacy defense of a user accused of disorderly conduct during an Occupy Wall Street protest last October, telling a New York appeals court that police failed to comply with the U.S. Constitution's safeguards when trying to access his account.
A lower court's ruling in June that user "tweets are unprotected by the federal and New York constitutions is still erroneous," Twitter said in a brief filed this morning.
Last spring an announcement from the platform team at Twitter not-at-all-subtly suggested developers of third party clients should find something else to do, and today a list of changes to its API turns that whisper into a firm nudge. The limit that most directly affects any of the unofficial clients you may be interested in using is that existing apps currently servicing more than 100,000 individual user tokens will be allowed to double their current count, but cannot add any users past that without Twitter's permission.
Just when you think it's safe to tweet, here comes WeKnowYourHouse.com. The site is a social media experiment designed to show how easy it is for tweets to be used against you. If a Twitter user has location turned on, and they send a message with the word "home" in it, then the site will display it along with a Street View image of the location. Similar to PleaseRobMe.com, it showcases how some users may not be aware of how much information they are sharing.
In the vein of what Google has done for a few years now, Twitter released a “transparency tool” on Monday. The company showed the public for the first time exactly how many times governments ask for user information or ask for content to be taken down. The tool also shows how many DMCA takedown requests are made. The new tool's release comes on the same day that a New York criminal judge denied Twitter's motion to quash a subpoena request for an Occupy Wall Street protestor's data.
And now a public service announcement: don’t post photos of your debit or credit cards online. That might sound like an incredibly basic security rule, but it’s one dozens of Twitter users are breaking — and now one handle hopes to hold them to account.
@NeedADebitCard pillages the Twittersphere for unsuspecting users who posted completely legible photos of their credit and debit cards on the web. Its sole purpose: to shame those foolish enough to post Twitpics or Instagrams that contain their credit or debit card information.
Twitter blamed its on-again, off-again outages Thursday on a “cascading bug” that left 140-character addicts in a state of painful withdrawl.
But the pain could be most acute for Twitter itself as the company seeks to ramp up its credibility as a go-to venue for advertisers.
