Hackers hacked popular Twitter accounts and distributed porn links

The theft of social network accounts has long ceased to amaze, but recently hackers hacked more than 2500 popular accounts on Twitter. Among the victims were the accounts of the musical group Chromeo, comic Azim Antvala, The New York Times journalist David Carr. This was first reported by Symantec employees in their study .

In all the hacked accounts posted links to dating sites for adults, and instead of avatars put photos of women in their underwear. The brief description of the account in which malicious links similarly appeared also changed. In most cases, spam bots on Twitter are quite common, but this attack was characterized by targeting accounts with almost 100,000 subscribers. Most of the hacked accounts were created at least four years ago, and 27% of the total number registered in 2011.
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“Hacking such accounts potentially increases the likelihood of clicking on the link necessary for hackers compared to unpopular accounts.

Most likely, weak passwords that were repeatedly used on other sites by the same users contributed to cracking. For each registration, the attackers could get about $ 4, ”said Symantec employee Satnam Narang.

Representatives of the "Tweeter" did not comment on the study of specialists Symantec, but a relatively small number of hacked popular accounts excludes the likelihood of mass hacking. Theory of Symantec confirms the latest password leak with LinkedIn - among the most popular passwords were typical combinations like "123456", "password" and other similar ones. In addition, LinkedIn used SHA-1 for hashing, which made it easy to decrypt 48.52 million passwords.

It is possible that hackers could use phishing tools to hack some Twitter accounts. But it is time consuming, so this method is justified solely for accounts with the largest number of subscribers.