aliencam's dashboard

My twitter account was hacked, one spam message posted, and my account subsequently suspended. The spam was the Google Wizard message in the following format:

"Up to $240.30 so far today!!! i'll tweet another update later!! check out http:/ /G O 0GLE-WIZARD D.com"

"I've been doing this for 8 days so far, up to $142.90 so far - http:/ /G O 0GLE-WIZARD.com"

"Today was so exciting! Made $124 in 20 minutes! if ur interested, go read: http:/ /G O 0GLE-WIZARD.com"

My twitter usename is(was !?) "aliencam"

this happened to hundreds of users, and at least one other (@tomloverro via http://community.norton.com/t5/Ask-Ma... ) was using foursquare

read about this hack in these places:
http://community.norton.com/t5/Ask-Ma...

http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...

http://blog.aliencam.net/2009/07/goog...

So did a problem with foursquare compromise our twitter accounts? Were any other foursquare/twitter users "hacked" ??? I don't want to blame foursquare yet, but if lots of it's users were the ones with problems on twitter...

This morning someone used my account to post a spam message. I have not given out my password to any websites except foursquare (playfoursquare.com) and tweetsum a few times, and my password is fairly complicated (12 characters, capitals, numbers, and symbols).

the spam mesage that came from my account was: "Today was so exciting! Made $124 in 20 minutes! if ur interested, go read: ***************** "

Anyway, I did not post this spam message, I've been using this as my personal account since may 2007 (3,377 posts) and I am fairly confident (barring any unpublished hacks into tweetsum or foursquare) that my password is secure.

I did not notice this spam message until one of my friends told me about it. I promptly deleted the offending tweet, and changed my password.

As soon as I got a chance, I went to the twitter support site and reported this, thinking that there could be a vulnerability in Twitter, and I wanted to know if there was anything else I could to to ensure my account was secure. A few minutes after I submitted this help ticket, my account was suspended. I thought I was helping twitter out by reporting a possible security flaw, but nope, I got suspended :P (I put through another help ticket to reinstate my account).

A quick google search of the URL that was in the spam message shows that it was tweeted by arround 100 people today, and of the accounts I looked at, it seems like at least a dozen of them were legitimate accounts (one account being exclusively in spanish, with this english spam tweet). Also, not all of the accounts with this same message were banned, which reinforces my theory that I got myself banned :P.

I just did some more research, and according to "tweetlists .com" the two most popular URLs posted on twitter today direct to the same page that my twitter account linked to.

It seems to me that there are more than a few legitimate people being suspended for this particular spam message, and I can't find any similarity between the accounts that haven't been suspended yet.

This is also being discussed on a Symantec blog:

http://community.norton.com/t5/Ask-Ma...