Threat Lab Report: Social Networking Twitter Spam on the Rise

[Pete]

The adoption of social networking has spread like wild fire the past few years. It has become a mainstay as one of the major activities people participate in when on the Internet. However, at the same time, its popularity has attracted the attention of malware authors and other cyber criminals. After using Facebook and MySpace as a means to spread malware, they have now turned their attention to Twitter. A new virus utilizing Twitter has caught our eyes.

This new Twitter does not use "tweets" to spread, but instead is another type of email spam based phishing attack. The bait this time - is the trust users have for official invitation emails from Twitter itself.

The user will receive an invitation email from invitations@twitter.com with the subject being "Your friend invited you to twitter!". The contents of this email are identical to real invitations from Twitter with one exception: the invitation URL in the email is fake and does not lead to the Twitter Web site. Instead, it's a link to a Invitation Card.zip file. This zip file contains the virus Trojan.Win32.Buzus.anee. This virus infects Explorer.exe and will at theinstruction of its creator, download more malware onto the infected desktop.

With more and more people utilizing social networks as part of their everyday lives, attacks that exploit these social networks only look to be more common. The next time you receive a tweet or a app invite on Facebook, look twice before you click.