I came home today from work and by chance checked my Twitter feed only to see a Tweet I am positive was not sent by me. It read “The easiest way to lose fat” had a tinyurl link and a smiley face…
How the heck did my account get compromised?
That rouge tweet left me with a lot of questions. How the heck did it get there? Who sent it? was is an app, was I hacked? was it a virus on my Android phone or laptop or Home PC? Has my home, work or school Wifi computerized? I remember reading Twitter was hacked a few weeks back, was my account one of them? If yes, why didn’t Twitter tell me? I can’t remember ever being hacked or had a password of mine compromised, EVER, but here on my screen was a strange message sent out to my Twitter followers. Saying I was “surprised” was a gross understatement.
BBC.com Cloned
Against my better judgement I clicked the link, I had to find out where it lead and that is where things truly got interesting. The link lead to a well constructed clone of one of the most popular websites in the world – BBC.com. When I say say cloned I mean a fully reproduced version of the website complete with news stories, colours, layout, everything. It could have fooled almost anyone but when I looked at the URL it wasn’t pointing to the actual BBC.com website but a masked dot NET BBC variant.
Lots of Questions
On the website I heard a video playing about weight loss and mixed in with the usual BBC.com content were weird looking advertisements. Something was very fishy. I started to think again – if they somehow managed to hack my account (someone with really strong frequently changed passwords), how many other accounts have been hacked? How long has my account been compromised? How many other unsolicited messages have I sent? How many other persons are being fooled by this?
Help me figure this out!
I spent the last 2 hours doing some research and thought that I’d blog about this experience to put others on their guard. I will be reporting this breach to Twitter and ask anyone who can help me figure out how/when/why this happened drop me an email or leave a comment. Its drives me crazy as a geeky tech savvy person to know that… *gasp* ‘My’ Twitter account has been hacked.
Change your password!
done the minute I found out!