For the 2nd time in just 24 hours, Twitter has been hit with a spam worm! This time, it’s not the stalkdaily worm we reported on earlier today, but a new worm called mickeyy
Mickeyy – Twitter’s 2nd worm in 24 hours!
The mickeyy worm / virus is just like the last one; in that it seems to spread when people visit the web page, that contains a friends profile. Viewing profiles, using clients like TweetDeck does not seem to cause infection. This comes as a bit of a surprise, as Twitter claimed earlier to have plugged the security gap that allowed the previous hack exploit.
The Mickeyy worm comes hot on the heels of yesterday’s stalkdaily worm, which was infecting Twitter with its own spam payload. Whilst neither of these worms are reported to be dangerous, they are beginning to show some amazing holes in Twitters security.
Mickeyy worm – What to do
To avoid infection, our friends over at mashable.com suggest the following:
- Stop visiting Twitter profiles on the web, since these are the source.
- You might want use a 3rd party app like TweetDeck (TweetDeck reviews) or Seesmic Desktop for now.
- Disable javascript in your browser settings, or use a Firefox (Firefox reviews) add-on like no-script, which stops unwanted scripts from running.
If you think you might be infected, the mashable link above also gives details on what to do. (thanks mashable!)
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Thanks Jim for this post. I got infected a few times from this. I had no clue about this virus. Hopefully everything is back to normal soon. :-)
Mario,
The truth is, right now Twitter’s NOT a safe place to be. Might be a good time for people to start looking at alternatives?
Hi Jim,
I don’t know what to think about twitter at this point. I predict it’s gonna grow much more in the next couple of months. They are gonna have to do something on their end to fix all their problems. But the truth is it’s very easy to contaminate an entire network through this type of community. A few months back, my twitter account was hacked into and the person who did this started sending nonsense tweets to my followers as well as following as many people as possible in order to annoy me and ruin my relationships. Some people have lots of time in their hands to cause damage. It’s so sad because I do think twitter is an amazing tool when used appropriately.
Hi Mario,
Twitter is like any on line service, which becomes very popular very quickly. As it attracts more people (especially noobs), it will attract more attacks. Spammers / hackers go where the numbers are. These are smart guys. That’s why they attack Windows so much and linux / OSX so little. It’s about user numbers.
Expect to see more spam, more hacks and more worms as Twitter gets ever bigger.
Thanks Jim, thats great info. I hope that this isn’t going to end up being the thing that causes Twitter fade away. But they really have to get on it, this type of stuff is down right scary.
This is not confined to just twitter. My webpage on Tagged.com is infected as well. When I try to open my page it makes a call to edit my page and then a bunch of calls to the michalangelo page to download and process scripts. My friends computers crash when they try to visite my site. This Mickeyy guy is seriously pissing off a BUNCH of people. I can’t figure out how to debug it now.
Don’t the tagged.com people offer tech support, to solve the issue?