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September 10, 2013 03:16 am GMT

Massive Wave Of Twitter Phishing Spam Apparently Being Posted From HootSuite Users' Accounts

Image (1) hootsuite.jpg for post 134509Over the past hour or so there has been a massive wave of spam related to a ‘free Groupon of pure garcinia cambogia‘ rising on Twitter. The tweets are coming hot and heavy every few seconds and have targeted celebrity accounts like Jane Fonda, sports teams like the San Francisco Giants and even some TechCrunch writers. Updated below. Many other users appear to be affected by the tweets, and they all appear to have originated with the HootSuite client. One possible explanation for this is that a repository of HootSuite users have had their accounts compromised by a malicious entity gaining access to a company server. We reached out to HootSuite for comment and CEO Ryan Holmes said that they are “currently reviewing the spam incident” and will get back to us with a statement. HootSuite had some spamming issueslate last month. At the time, it said that it hadseen “an increase in attempts by spammers to gain unauthorized access to social media accounts by exploiting password weaknesses,” but stated that it had not been hacked. Instead, it said that it was “seeing attempts (some successful) to login to HootSuite using user IDs and passwords acquired from compromised social networks.” At the moment we don’t know whether this is a similar case or not. One thing to note is that the URLs being posted do not use HootSuite’s standard ‘owl.ly’ shortner, which could indicate that they’re not coming from the company’s native platform. Here’s what the tweets look like inline: And here’s a tweet by Jane Fonda showing the ‘via HootSuite’ label: The link in the tweets takes you to a modified link for Garcinia Cambogia that is clearly supposed to ape Groupon, a classic phishing tactic that the attackers hope will net either Groupon login details or more likely financial information when they go to order said supplement. At this point one culprit is a HootSuite hack of some sort, as user Sam Houston reports that he’s seeing the same message on both Twitter and Facebook. Both messages posted by the HootSuite client. Other users are saying that their LinkedIn accounts have been affected as well. We’re working to assess how widespread the spam issue is and what the extent of the damage to HootSuite users, but for now you should exercise caution. If you ever think that any Twitter app is compromised, you should revoke its permissions in

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/uvwCvbS_PoY/

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