Mysterious accounts seem to be appearing all over the popular Twitter micro-blogging website. The suspicious accounts appear to be posting complete gibberish, when in reality are posting executable commands that are downloading malware to victims computers.
Hackers have always longed to find new ways to hide their tracks and make attacks harder to see coming, but now hackers have turned to Twitter to become the host of a series of attacks against users. Hackers have managed to form a botnet using Twitter as a way to control compromised PCs.
The compromised computers could potentially launch DoS (denial of service) attacks – something Twitter has been hit by multiple times over the last few months – or spread spam to other users, turning the victim into a botnet as well.
Twitter is now reviewing the suspected accounts and suspending suspicious activity from happening, but since the shutdowns, more command-line accounts are being registered, popping up all over the website. These accounts could possibly be the very same ones that turn computers into slaves, attacking the very site that affected them.
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