Acai Berry spam attack connected with Gawker password hack, says Twitter

Hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts appear to have been compromised by hackers, who have spread spam promoting an Acai Berry diet.

Typical spam messages included:

I lost 9lbs using acai! RT This! [link]

and

Lost 10lbs using acai berry! RT This! [link]

The messages appeared so quickly that initial reports suggested that simply visiting the webpage linked to in the messages might automatically post the message from your own Twitter account, however the truth may instead be connected to a high profile password hack that came to light on a different website over the weekend.

According to Del Harvey, Twitter’s director of trust and safety, the messages appear to have been posted from accounts where users were using the same password on both Twitter and the recent Gawker website hack. (Note that their are many…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.