phishing

Twitter is quite a useful tool and there is a lot of media hype about it. There are also a lot of other websites that provide useful services for twitter users. For example, http://twitterfeed.com/ is something I use to automatically push links from my blog onto my twitter page.

In your height of enthusiasm in using twitter you need to be careful about other sites that you are signing up to. These sites that provide additional functionality with twitter may not always be what you think.

It would be very easy for someone to set up a nice looking website that innocently asks you to enter your twitter username and password. Once you do that you have compromised your security. Worse still, if you are one of the many who use the same password for your email, ebay, O2\Vodafone accounts etc then you are suddenly open to a whole world of problems. This approach to gathering usernames and passwords from legitmate looking sites is called “phishing”, pleas be aware of it!

Have a read of these two links for some more info….

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/gone-phishing.html

http://news.cnet.com/twitter-phishing-scam-may-be-spreading/