Gleeonsky – first UK Promoted Tweets exploited by spammers

Surprise surprise. Within minutes of Twitter announcing that UK brands can now target British Twitter users with promoted tweets and trends, spammers are also jumping on the bandwagon.

Twitter UK says that Sky is using its entire suite of promoted products to advertise that the TV show “Glee” returns to British TV screens tonight.

To increase awareness, Sky is using the twitter account @gleeonsky and paying for the hashtag #gleeonsky to be promoted to British Twitter users.

Of course, they’re not the only ones taking advantage of the hashtag. Spammers are using it too.

I suspect that when Sky paid for the #gleeonsky hashtag to be promoted on Twitter, this isn’t the kind of response they were hoping for. They wanted people to watch the TV…

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.