by Michelle Lentz

I promised myself I wouldn’t write another post on Twitter – we’ve sort of been Twitter-heavy the last two weeks. But this is newsworthy.

First off, careful what you click. I know you are all smart, capable adults, but sometimes we can all accidentally click the wrong thing.

In the last few days, I’ve received several direct messages from friends that were phishing attacks in disguise. The first screenshot below – hey look at this funny blog – is the one that worries me the most. To me, at least, that one sounds the most believable.

The rule here? If it looks suspicious, don’t click it. At least one of these takes you to http://twitterblog.access-logins.com/login. When you get to the site, it looks just like the Twitter login page, with the exception of the URL. If you enter your information, you’re essentially offering your user name and password to the phishers.

Image Credit

Now, it’s just Twitter, so it’s not that big of a deal until you consider how many people out there just might be using the same user name/password combination all over the web. Suddenly all sorts of accounts are vulnerable.

Now, remember what I said about paying attention? My guess is some folks out there, overworked personal assistants or interns or who knows, did not pay attention. Apparently the Twitter feed for Barack Obama, Rick Sanchez (CNN), Britney Spears, and Fox News have been hacked. Well, hacked in that they are certainly not posting the latest updates themselves. TechCrunch has the full story on the Celeb Hacking.

Twitter is doing a good job of pulling all of these fake tweets, as well as direct message phishes, fairly rapidly. The only sign of several of the direct messages I received was in my email – they’ve been pulled from my Twitter feed.

Just be aware of what you click.

UPDATE: Twitter announced today that the two circumstances have nothing to do with each other. In fact, the celeb account issues stemmed from an insecure support tool Twitter was using. Those tools have now been shut down and will not be put into use again until all security holes are plugged.

Once you’re hacked, you’re heading towards mainstream. However it remains to be seen if Twitter is truly ready for prime-time yet.

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