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Communications Security IT

Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack 81

Posted by timothy from the 140-character-judgment dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Twitter users are being warned not to click on messages saying "'ol, this is funny,' as they can lead to their account details being stolen. A widespread attack has hit Twitter this weekend, tricking users into logging into a fake Twitter page — and thus handing their account details over to hackers. Messages include Lol. this is me?? / lol , this is funny. / ha ha, u look funny on here / Lol. this you?? followed by a link in the form of http://example/ [dot] com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma [dot] net/login, where 'example.com' can vary. Clicking on the link redirects users to the second-half of the link, where the fake login page is hosted. In a video and blog entry, computer security firm Sophos is warning users that it is not just Twitter direct messages (DMs) that carry the poisoned links, but they are appearing on public profiles due to services such as GroupTweet which republish direct messages. Sophos also reports that the site being used for the Twitter phishing has also been constructed to steal information from users of the Bebo social network. Affected users are advised to change their passwords immediately."
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Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack More

Twitter Hit By BZPharma LOL Phishing Attack

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  • You can't have twitter without (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:23PM (#31220966)

    twits.

  • Lol (Score:5, Funny)

    by indrora ( 1541419 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:28PM (#31221008)

    this is funny.

  • we need to stop coddling stupidity. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:28PM (#31221010)

    Seriously, anyone with more than a few functional neurons is not going to type their password into a page they reached by clicking on a link from "LOL this is funny!".

    We need to let people like that sink or swim. People end up being as stupid as we let them be. If we expect complete idiocy, we will *get* complete idiocy, and that harms the experience for the rest of us.

    I say let these people experience the consequences of their own actions.

    • Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by InterruptDescriptorT ( 531083 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:44PM (#31221140) Homepage
      I don't necessarily disagree with you when you say 'We need to let people like that sink or swim', but in this world of tightly connected social networks where friendship among individuals governs their level of access to your details, I'm not so sure about that. You're only as secure as your weakest link. If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme and gives up his login information to the attackers, then your information is exposed to them, and you're put at risk. This is why while I sympathize with your point, I still think it's incredibly important that phishing attacks like this be cracked down upon as quickly as possible to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You're under the mistaken impression that any of us here on Slashdot have friends. My social network of one person, myself, is quite large enough, thank you.

      • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

        by biryokumaru ( 822262 ) *

        If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme

        Ha, your logic is flawed. No one here has friends!

      • Re:we need to stop coddling stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by asdf7890 ( 1518587 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @04:08PM (#31221362)

        It isn't that your information is exposed if a friend's account is broken into (if you have stuff on Facebook or similar that you would care about being made public, then you are doing it wrong), it is the fact that a compromised account means the frauster has easten their way at least one level into your trust network. This means you have to think that little bit harder about your day-to-day link clicking (assuming some of your contacts are like some of mine and their dribblings are not always easy to distinguish from spam/phishing).

        The real problem is more dangerous phishing - that which attempts to gain access to bank details or attempts to convince the user to let some local code to install. There is no way we'll ever completely stamp that out just as there is no partical way of completely stamping out burglary. The only thing we can do is to try educate the general public (spit) to be a little (or in many cases a lot) less naive. This is unfortunately much easier said than done - some people seem incapable of maintaining a healthy level of synacism when promised free smilies/cheats/porm or just "lols".

        Every now and then I consider starting a small spam/phish campaign that collects data, throws it all away, and give the user s "why the hell were you stupid enough to do that?!?!" message. Perhaps distrubuting it as an app that collects Facebook account details and uses them to post a message stating "is stupid enough to give their password to a third party website" before deleting them. The second most significan reason I don't do this (the first being I'm too lazy to bother) is that the idiots caught and made to look daft would see me as the enemy and not learn anything more generally useful (like "if one anonymous site promising free shit can't be trusted with my password/creditcard/wife then maybe others can't either") from the exercise. Maybe banks could do it with their own customer base though - send out a fake phish and lock the accounts of people that fall for it until such time as the phone up and promise to be more careful in future.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nedlohs ( 1335013 )

        If you put your information on facebook then it's already "exposed" to everyone. You'd have to be even dumber than someone who would fall for such a fake login link to think otherwise.

        • Indeed. I have a facebook account. It has my full name (quite unique), my date of birth, and a rough geographical location. It's one of the few instances which appears when I search for my full name (only one page on google). It basically states in a field viewable to anyone that it's my account, this is my only account, and no others accounts which report to be mine are genuine.

          I've never used it. It's there so nobody can impersonate me on facebook (a big issue, considering the whole online bullying / sui

      • I don't necessarily disagree with you when you say 'We need to let people like that sink or swim', but in this world of tightly connected social networks where friendship among individuals governs their level of access to your details, I'm not so sure about that. You're only as secure as your weakest link. If one of your less technologically-savvy friends on Facebook happens to fall for this scheme and gives up his login information to the attackers, then your information is exposed to them, and you're put at risk.

        Let this be a lesson that content put on a public network is never private. If you have stuff on Facebook you think is private, you should remove it right now, because Facebook has one of the worst track records for security and privacy breeches, and a demonstrable lack of concern for the privacy of your personal data (e.g. beacon fiasco).

        What is incredibly important here is for people to realise that sites like Facebook *will never be truly private* and your value to them is precisely in the amount of info

    • We need to let people like that sink or swim.

      You must remember that when they sink, their bodies sink to the deep to feed the legions of bottom feeders, which in turn grow to monstrous size. Eventually, we get dread 100,000 strong botnet krakens which rise to the surface and drag sites under with all hands lost.

      In light of this, I prefer giving these users swim bands as a preventative measure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mr Z ( 6791 )
      When you figure out how to get a botnet to only DDoS itself and not clog our inboxes with spam, let me know. Otherwise, legions of morons getting their machines conscripted into zombie hordes of spam-churning, site crashing drones is everybody's problem.

  • Interestingly... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DavidR1991 ( 1047748 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @03:29PM (#31221018) Homepage

    ...I just deliberately sought out this thing so I could see what it looked like - and amazingly, whatever it does, it manages to somehow hide the "Suspected phishing site" page in Google Chrome: It briefly appears but then the page seems to reload automatically and the page disappears

    So not only is this a pretty sophisticated clone of Twitter's login, they've somehow managed to force their way past the attack warning too. Any ideas how they've done that?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by VoltageX ( 845249 )
      Worth reporting to Mozilla/Google?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by CubeDude213 ( 678340 )
      I did the same thing when I got a direct message with it but Safari managed to warn me. I believe Safari uses Google’s database of phishing sites so it looks like a bug in Chrome.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Came up with the protection without issue here on 5.0.317.2 dev, might just be the older versions that are affected?

    • I've added that specific page and domain to the Phishtank, causing the page to appear in the first place. ( http://www.phishtank.com/user.php?username=alexanderpas [phishtank.com] ) Probaly they used some kind of exploit to bypass the attack warning. The best way, is not to only rely on your browser for protection, but take a multilayered approach, for Example, Using OpenDNS ensuring the request doesn't even hit the DNS system.

      • That same OpenDNS anti phishing crap prevented me from going to a very prominent and perfectly innocuous German-language cooking website a couple of days ago. Pissed me off to no end because even after replacing the OpenDNS servers, I still got redirected because of some caching or other shenanigans. After some fiddling and restarting things it started working, though. And with DNS redirecting, it's not a matter of hitting a "Yes I'm sure" button, you can't get to the site full stop.

        Thanks but no thanks, I'

    • That's okay. If you use Chrome, Google already has your passwords, and changed them last week to prevent you from giving it out to phishing sites.
  • wolves come out in force.

  • A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      well youre tricked into thinking your actually logging on the real twitter, so when you log you GIVE them your password, so its not really like they are stealing it, just receiving it

      • well youre tricked into thinking your actually logging on the real twitter, so when you log you GIVE them your password, so its not really like they are stealing it, just receiving it

        I think if you commit a crime (copyright fraud counts) and use deception in an attempt to obtain something you should not have and do not have a right to have (someone else's login info), and can not use, that is stealing. If you leave a laptop out in public with a text editor open, and someone types in their password for no

  • Pretty simple solution... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EWAdams ( 953502 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @07:02PM (#31223038) Homepage

    ... ignore Twitter. That can't be hard, can it? How many hundreds of thousands of years did the human race do without it? And what has it contributed? The prosecution rests.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Enjoy your nap.

    • I remember people saying that about the internet, yet here you are, being an old man on it.

      • The contribution of the Internet is indisputable. Even when it was the ARPANET its value was trivially obvious.

        Twitter, on the other hand, is just trivial. And if it is now a source of germs as well, forget it.

  • What about URL shortening services? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Sunday February 21, 2010 @10:56PM (#31225046)

    I've always wondered why we don't see more phishing attacks with URL shortening services. Why not just tweet "Hey check out the pictures of my latest vacation at my picasaweb [tinyurl.com] page"? I don't think forcing users to install yet another plugin which checks out the tinyurl link as there's more than enough companies that do shorten URLs to make this plugin be yet another one which has to have to phone home to get updates...

  • I guess I have a hard time understanding why these things are so hard to block (globally). Doesn't Twitter maintain some sort of global regex cookbook of spam-laden crap?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Welcome to THE FUTURE! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Twitter and Facebook are the AOL of the 21st century.

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