Twitter has been hit by spam attacks before, but not like this. The latest threat to everyone’s favourite microblogging service is StalkDaily. If that word looks familiar to you, chances are it’s already too late. If not, there’s still time to safeguard yourself. Read on for all the warnings, and how to keep yourself safe.
StalkDaily is a website designed to infect computers that visit it. For that reason, we can’t advise strongly enough against Googling it or guessing at the URL. Unfortunately, it’s now turned against Twitter users, with accounts hijaked by the malevolent worm sending masses of tweets to ask followers to visit a link. Yep, you guessed it, that link points directly to the StalkDaily site.
Worse still, the StalkDaily worm appears to be altering the Twitter biographies of infected accounts to insert its own link and, according to some blogs, even visiting the profile page of an infected twitter account could compromise your computer.
Twitter’s own spam account is already warning Twitter users not to link directly to the StalkDaily site.
To stay on the safe side it’s best to avoid any suspicious looking links from pals on your Twitter follow list, even those that have been shortened, and for extra security use a third party Twitter application, rather than visiting profile pages directly. We recommend TweetDeck or Twhirl.
The way StalkDaily got hold of Twitter users’ account details and passwords is still a mystery, as is the solution for those who have had their Twitter logins hijacked. We’ll bring you updates as soon as we have them, in the meantime you can follow us on Twitter too. No spam, we promise.
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