NHS Direct Twitter account compromised by Acai Berry diet spammers

NHS Direct, the UK helpline which provides expert health advice via the telephone and internet, has had its Twitter account taken over by spammers promoting an Acai Berry diet.

At 10:40pm UK time on Sunday night, the NHS Direct Twitter account posted the following message:

Are you wanting to lose some weight? i highly suggest this [LINK]

Because the NHS Direct service is well-known in the UK for providing health advice, it’s possible that some followers might have thought that the link was genuine, and clicked on it.

Fortunately, Twitter is now identifying the webpage pointed to by the shortened link as “potentially harmful”, but anyone who had clicked would have been taken to a bogus news website promoting an Acai Berry diet:

The sneaky marketroids trying to sell their diet pills present their webpage as though it were an online news report.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the diet website appears to be remarkably similar to the Acai…

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.