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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Social networking site Twitter (www.twitter.com) warned users Monday that phishers are directing users to fake Twitter login pages in an effort to dupe them into handing over their user names and password credentials, according to reports by various sites, including blogger Chris Pirillo and The Washington Post's Security Fix.
This is the latest incident involving phishing attacks on social networking sites. In January 2007, phishers gathered a large quantity of data via a spoofed Myspace login page.
This past weekend, reports of a phishing scheme directing users to a fraudulent log-in page began to surface. Phishers have since then been using compromised Twitter accounts to try to trick users into offering their log-in credentials in exchange for an Apple iPhone.
Twitter reported on its blog that in an unrelated incident, 33 Twitter accounts, including those belonging to President-Elect Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Rick Sanchez, FoxNews, Facebook, and Huffington Post, were all recently hacked.
The company explains in the blog post that the hacking of the 33 accounts differ from the phishing scams directed at Twitter users in that "these accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools [Twitter's] support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can't remember or get stuck."
The hack was discovered Monday, but the social networking site said the affected users have now regained complete control of their accounts.
Security software firm Symantec issued this warning on its blog to Twitter users:
If you suspect you've already been victimized by this scam, change your Twitter account password immediately. If you have any trouble with this, you can contact the Twitter support team for assistance.
Meanwhile, Twitter revealed on its blog that it is actively reviewing the security levels of all access points to its service, as well as increasing the security of its login mechanism and further restricting access to its support tools.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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