Sir, the floor wishes to hear no more about your colon.
The Twitter worm/twishing attack of the other day has caught some interesting casualties in its net, most notably Marco Rubio a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and a viable candidate for one of Florida’s Senate seats in 2010 and Zach Wamp, a candidate for Governor of Tennessee and a 14 year U.S. congressional representative.
The @marcorubio twitter account announced “lol it’s amazing. look and feel great with http://cleansefats.com.” on Wednesday. The campaign spokesman Alex Burgos stated that the account password was quickly changed and they are still investigating what happened. The Twitter worm from Wednesday is known to create a phishing style web site to capture Twitter credentials, however there has been no admission from the campaign that anyone fell for this method. It is also not clear that the attack isn’t also seeded by breaking into someone’s Twitter account, a vector still fairly wide open as we detailed in Breaking Twitter. Finally there is the possibility that the “Hi, this you on here” and this attack are separate. Twitter is usually pretty light on details of their analysis (assuming there is an analysis) of these attacks after the fact.
Senate Candidate Rubio discusses colon cleanser.
To his credit, candidate Rubio handled the whole incident pretty well:
I got hacked selling something?Could be worse. They could have written Go Noles or Go Jets as if it was
coming from me!
9:43 AM Oct 29th from Echofon
Meanwhile Congressman Wamp’s account @zachwamp sent out direct messages or DM’s to his followers reading: “hi. this works. i feel better and look great. http://bdgdfij.info.”. This URL also leads to a site about colon cleansing.
Congressman Wamp warned his followers about the DM’s with the following tweet:
Disregard any direct message you get from my acct, we got spammed. Go to http://zachwamp.com to
see my real vision for a healthy Tennessee!
12:25 PM Oct 29th from web
It is unclear at this time whether members of government are targeted because their Twitter followers are in specific need of colon cleansing products and therefore more susceptible to such advertising. Constipation may explain some of the angrier political discourse in the nation of the last six months or so.
Filed Under: Phishing
I can’t wait to see how Twitter turn their brand equity and traffic into money.
If I were them, I’d come up with some sort of Adsense-like program with revenue share to the Twitter page owner and sell small and tasteful banner ads on profile pages at a cost per impression and a cost per click.
I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the page layout of your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?