The message might have come in early today on your Twitter feed, “Want to know whos stalking you on twitter!?: http://twitviewer.net/” You might have clicked the link to visit the website. It all happened so fast, the fabulous offer (heck yeah, I want to know who the last 200 people are to look at my Twitter profile!) and the large scale distribution of the “tweet”. Even seasoned journalists who should always wear their cynical and world-weary thinking caps fell for it.
Yes, Virginia, it was a phishing scam that required people to cough up their Twitter username and password. It’s true there are third party Twitter applications requiring the same thing but one must always be highly suspicious of anyone asking for your password. And considering that the website was created today and was a complete unknown, you would have expected people to have taken a few moments to consider.
After all, how do you track web traffic? You have to be the one managing the site to see who clicks on your profile page . And unless the TwitViewer.net people have signed up all the Twitter users, they couldn’t have that capability. Twitter could tell you, and possibly provide such a service through a partner, but you wouldn’t then need to give up your credentials to another service. You’d login to Twitter as normal and have the data provided to you.
The best advice if you fell for, literally, the phishing “scam-du-jour,” is to immediately change your Twitter password. That’s the advice from Twitter. You’ll be glad to know the TwitViewer.net site is down, hopefully ending this particular cybercriminal chapter. For more information on spam and Twitter, make sure you follow www.twitter.com/spam.