Simon Pegg is Twitter-hacked, warns fans of Trojan horse threat

British comic actor Simon Pegg, star of movies such as “Shaun of the Dead”, “Hot Fuzz”, and most recently the alien comedy “Paul”, has claimed that his Twitter account has been hacked in order to spread malware to his 1.2 million followers.

Simon Pegg normally tweets to his fans with TweetDeck or Twitterific, but the offending message was sent via the Twitter for BlackBerry application instead:

Download the new “Paul” Sceen Saver [LINK] after download right click and press test to install.

Fans of Simon Pegg rushed to download the screensaver, only for many of them to report that their anti-virus software had found a Trojan horse in the ScreenSaver.exe file being linked to.

Pegg posted a few messages indicating that he believed his account had been hacked, claiming that he did not post any messages about a screensaver, and warning fans of the “computer virus” threat. He doesn’t mince his words about what he thinks of the hacker…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

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.