Telstra's Twitter account hijacked

Australian telco Telstra's ambitious foray into social media has backfired after its Twitter account was hacked and used to spread malicious links.

The company's broadband arm, BigPond, has been using Twitter to provide customer support since late last year but this week someone broke into the "BigPondTeam" account and began sending direct messages to its 1866 followers.

The messages said "hey, look at this" and included a link to a page that appeared to be an official "videos.twitter.com" link, but was actually a link to a phishing site designed to steal people's Twitter user names and passwords.

Telstra's is not the only Twitter account to be hacked and used to send malicious links and similar tricks are affecting users on other sites such as Facebook.

The Twitter account of Australian actor and star of City Homicide, Daniel MacPherson, was also broken into recently and used to send messages that were identical to those sent from the BigPond account.

Each account that is compromised provides the hackers with a new set of followers to infect.

However, the fact that Telstra is a relatively trusted source could have lured more people than usual into the trap.

"Someone, identity unknown, used the BigPond Twitter account to send unauthorised DMs [direct messages] to some of our followers," Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton said.

"The incident is under investigation with Twitter and we have advised our followers not to open the DM."

The scheme is even more sinister on Facebook, as the accounts of people who unwittingly enter their login details are set to automatically spam friends' walls with the malicious links. If the user deletes the wall posts, additional posts are automatically published.

Another type of Twitter scam doing the rounds this week involves direct messages with links promising to show people how to "make money online with google". Users who sign up are forced to pay an initial fee, which then disappears along with the scammer.

- © Fairfax NZ News