Researchers at Symantec have identified a spike in Twitter messages carrying links to malicious programs for Android mobile devices in recent weeks, according to a post on Symantec’s Security Response blog on Monday.
The post, penned by Joji Hamada, describes a series of Russian and English-language tweets discussing software, mobile devices and dieting topics containing links to sites distributing the Opfake malware. One Twitter campaign identified by researchers sent over 130,000 malicious tweets from 100 accounts.
Several of the Twitter accounts have since been suspended and Symantec said it is working with Twitter to disable accounts that are sending out malicious links.
Earlier this month, the Opfake malware was found attempting to cater to Apple’s iPhone users. Through social engineering, some websites convinced iPhone users that their browser needed to be updated and in turn, asked users for their phone number. It’s widely speculated these numbers were used to commit premium rate SMS fraud.
There have been countless spam campaigns since the micro blogging service’s inception, in which attackers exploit the service’s shortened URLs and trending topics to serve up their malware.
