Twitter targeted by job scammers

The American Better Business Bureau (BBN) has joined an ever-increasing list of parties happy to express the concern about the vulnerabilities inherent in using Twitter.

In an interview with the LA Times BBB spokeswoman Alison Southwick explained that the Bureau had identified a number of firms looking to exploit users. Typically these will offer training courses designed to make the user money using the service. Ultimately, however, they appear to deliver nothing but big bills and disappointment.

"It's unbelievable how widespread this is," she added. And with so many people vulnerable and looking for jobs, a scheme like this is going to have people falling for it when they can least afford to."

Recently security expert Graham Cluley warned that what seemed like an innocent 'name game' could actually be exploited by undesirables looking to gain personal information normally associated with privacy and login details.

"A hacker could grab details like your pet's name to try and crack into your email account," Cluley warned. "Think that's unlikely? Well, the likes of Sarah Palin, Paris Hilton and Salma Hayek have all had their private email accounts broken into by hackers after they guessed their so-called 'secret answers'. In addition, just think of how many people use the name of their beloved pet labradoodle as their password for umpteen online accounts anyway!"

The security firm Pandalabs also recently uncovered a series of rogueware campaigns surrounding popular tweets. In a blog post Sean-Paul Correll from the firms technical support team said that he had found a number of zombie accounts that ultimately linked Tweeters through to malware serving pornography sites. He added "Tthe interesting part of it all is that cyber criminals are starting to target social networking sites more than ever."

Tweeter beware.