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This article was published on August 31, 2010

Beware: fake Tweetdeck “download” tweets hide software trojan

Beware: fake Tweetdeck “download” tweets hide software trojan
Chad Catacchio
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Chad Catacchio
Chad Catacchio
Story by

Chad Catacchio

Chad Catacchio is a contributor writing on a variety of topics in tech. He has held management positions at a number of tech companies in th Chad Catacchio is a contributor writing on a variety of topics in tech. He has held management positions at a number of tech companies in the US and China. Check out his personal blog to connect with him or follow him on Twitter (if you dare).

Tweetdeck has announced that a series of malicious tweets are circulating that ask users to download a new version of Tweetdeck, but actually the link downloads a software trojan (virus) onto your computer.

Possibly, this attack was timed to coincide with Twitter’s move to OAuth today – i.e. the attackers may have thought that some people would think they needed to upgrade Tweetdeck because of the change – but no way to know for sure.

Here’s how Tweetdeck’s blog explains the threat:

“We are seeing a number of updates on Twitter urging users to download a file called “tweetdeck-08302010-update.exe” from a URL beginning withhttp://alturl.com/.

These tweets are from hacked accounts and this file does not come from us. Do not download it.

Official updates are exclusively available at: http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/ To ensure your safety TweetDeck files should only be downloaded from this location… If in doubt, only download from here or http://www.tweetdeck.com itself.

The updates often being with one of the following phrases:

  1. TweetDeck will work until tomorrow, udate now!
  2. Download TweetDeck update ASAP!
  3. Update TweetDeck!
  4. Hurry up for tweetdeck update!
  5. Sorry for offtopic, but it is a critical TweetDeck update. It won’t work tomorrow!