Check your Twitter account for rogue applications

Bird silhouette. Credit: ShutterstockIf you’re careless about what applications you allow to access your Twitter account, don’t be surprised if you find the bad guys are spamming tweets out in your name without your permission.

Here’s just a small sample of the messages we saw earlier today, claiming to link to free iPhone 4 offers or tools to help you find out who had unfollowed your Twitter account.

Some of the messages posted from innocent users’ Twitter accounts have claimed that it’s easy to get your hands on a free iPhone 4:

Tweets made by rogue application

Whereas others seem to suggest that they offer a way to easily monitor who has unfollowed you on Twitter. (Which is perhaps an attractive tool after Twitter acknowledge earlier this week that the service was suffering from an “unfollowing bug”).

Tweets made by rogue applications

Rogue applications we have seen sending these messages include:

Unfollow Monitor App v1.0
Who Unfollowed You v2.9
Tweet Statistics App v1.0
Unfollow Stats App v1.3
Tweet Info App 1.3
Twit Stats App v1.2
Unfollow Details App v1.1

If you were unfortunate enough to grant one of these rogue applications access to your Twitter account, revoke its rights immediately by going to the Twitter website, visiting the Settings/Apps option and revoking the offending application’s rights.

Revoke an application's access to your Twitter account

If you’re on Twitter and want to learn more about threats, be sure to follow me at @gcluley and the rest of the @NakedSecurity team.

Bird silhouette image, from ShutterStock

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity 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 analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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