Twitter as a botnet command center
posted Aug 26th 2009 11:37am by Matt Schultzfiled under: news, security hacks
The folks over at Arbor Networks were browsing Twitter and discovered something very strange: a Twitter account seemingly posting gibberish. At least, that’s how it appeared at first. Upon closer investigation, they discovered that the profile was posting base64 encoded links to PKZIP archives. When they extracted the contents and unpacked the contained DLL and EXE files, they discovered that the account was posing links to malware that would post user information back to certain URLs. The article was also updated to show that the scheme wasn’t limited to Twitter, but also affected users on Jaiku and Tumblr. It’s a bit scary to see that all malware isn’t as blatantly obvious as we usually would think it to be.
I’ve found twitter and other blog accounts which were being used to push out the latest spam marketing emails. Guess I should be more vigilant in reporting them.