Public Service Announcement - Twitter gets tough on Spam

I've written about spam on Twitter before yet follower Spam continues to annoy Twitter users.  As Twitter has grown in popularity, it has gotten more aggressive about combatting spam. In the past, the best defense against spammers was to block the spammer from viewing your updates. It was understood that Twitter tracked the blocks closely and the community's self-policing would be acted upon by Twitter. And it seemed to work fairly well as many of the spammers were removed.  Now TechCrunch reports that Twitter has taken an even more aggressive approach by introducing the Spam account.  By sending a reply @spam or direct message will get a spammer on the list.  I just started to follow the Spam account and suggest that you do as well. Let's get rid of Spam!

Serious Spam

We've all seen the Twitter spammers, those people with weird Twitter names like Stella613 or MikeGravel832 whofollow thousands and broadcast a single message multiple times. In fact, I've written about the spammers before and Twitter's efforts to control it. Unfortunately, Twitter spam and malware is turning a lot more sinister.

Adam Cohen told me about a site, Twitpwn, that is focused on logging all past and current vulnerabilities in Twitter. The guys at Twitpwn write about the potential for distributing malware via Twitter. Security experts at Kaspersky Labs have identified  a malicious Twitter profile twitter.com/[skip]/ with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’ which has a photo advertising a video with girls posted.
This profile has obviously been created especially for infecting users, as there is no other data except the photo, which contains the link to the video.
If you click on the link, you get a window that shows the progress of an automatic download of a so-called new version of Adobe Flash which is supposedly required to watch the video. You end up with a file labeled Adobe Flash (it’s a fake) on your machine; a technique that is currently very popular.
In reality, this is a Trojan downloader that proceeds to download 10 banker Trojans onto the infected machine, all of which are disguised as MP3 files. We first detected the downloader proactively as Heur.Downloader and then added a signature to detect it also as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Banload.sco.

News of the malware/virus profile has been spreading fast as it has been written about on Ars Technica, TechCrunch and The Register, but of course good Twitermaven readers don't go to those minor sites and only depend on the maven for news. :)

Do we hate spam that much?

Greetings from my summer office in Mashpee, MA.  Well, it would be nice to stay at New Seabury all summer, but I guess I'll have to make do with a week.  The beach is great, but the itch to blog is greater, so here is a quick post.  I'm sure glad that Starbucks is giving me 2 free hours for my overpriced, under-flavored Pike Place drip.  Anyhow, a great article from twitter bud, Jennifer Leggio, writing about Twitter's new anti-spam efforts.  I applaud Biz for taking an aggressive stance in his on-going battle with bots that follow way too many people.  In fact, I've written about spammers and bad corporate twitter practice several times.  However, it seems that Twitter's indiscriminate new policy's have affected innocent, power-users. Twitter rockstar and bonafide friend to all, Chris Brogan, has been limited in adding followers.

As Chris Penn tweeted this morning, "Twitter needs to get their stuff together. capping Chris Brogan means effectively capping his conversations, so what good is it?"

None of us want to see DarkSideSports and 24hBerlin (2 recent followers) show up in their twitter stream, but to stop them at the expense of Chris Brogan and ComcastCares, I don't think so.

Ok, the itch is scratched, so it's back to the beach.  But I'm sure I'll be back soon!

Spam, spam, spam

Lately it seems like 1/3 of my new followers are spammers.  You know who they are.  Usually they have some strange number at the end of their name, like Stella214, Sarah717 or MikeGravel832. (Sorry, I usually include links to twitter accounts, but due to the subject, I don’t want to provide any traffic).  Other than a weird name, how can you identify a spammer? Usually you can tell from the following signs:

·        They do not engage in conversations with anyone (no @warrenss, for example), but just broadcast a single message often multiple times.

·        They usually use false profiles.

·        They often follow thousands of people. 

·        And their following/follower ratio is often highly skewed, they follow at least 5-10X as many people that follow them.

·        Most use the twitter default avatar (no photo).

Their goal is get you to click on the link in their stream or their profile. Now we all are very interested in get rich quick schemes, penile implants, car mileage enhancers, etc. So how could we have survived on twitter without them?? I don’t if there is a bad book out there that they are following, but I am seeing more and more of them.  And now it looks like some companies in their haste to get on twitter are exhibiting the same behavior.

Maybe twitter should take Chris Cardinal’s advice which is similar to how LinkedIn controls spam.  What do you think?