Twitter users hit with typo-squatting phishing campaign

In the wake of last week’s compromise of 250,000 Twitter accounts comes another threat to Twitter users: phishing messages – both DMs and tweets – that lure in the curious by asking “Did you see this pic of you?”

Appended to the message is a bit.ly shortened link that leads to a changing subdomain on hecro.ru, from which the victims are redirected to one of a number of spoofed Twitter login pages located on typosquat-style domains such as tivtter.com, iftwtter.com and iwltter.com.

Users that type in and submit their Twitter username and password will be taken to a fake error page (click on the screenshot to enlarge it):

While they get redirected to the official Twitter website, the stolen login credentials get sent to a remote server and will ultimately be used for hijacking the users’ accounts in order to spread spam.

Websense researchers have managed to view the statistics for one of the shortened URLs used in this spam campaign, and it turns out that 55 users have followed it.

If it seems that not many users have fallen for the scheme, consider the fact that the spammers are rapidly changing the links as Bit.ly flags them as “potentially problematic,” making the number likely much, much larger.

As always, users are advised not to follow links contained in unsolicited messages and to always carefully check the URL of any login page they consider entering credentials in.