New Twitter Worm on the loose, don’t click suspicious links. Details here.

Updates at the foot of the post.

There’s a worm spreading rapidly across twitter. It appears to be a tweet with no text but just a URL. A twitter search highlights the extent of the problem.

The URL appears to be identical: http://goo.gl/R7f68 on every tweet but it’s highly likely that it will alter itself at some point.

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What we’ve been able to learn is that the worm seems to be either creating or using a number of spam/newer accounts – that said a few influentials have also tweeted the URL. The results of the search only go back about 6 hours, so it hasn’t been around that long and appears to stem from mobile.twitter.com.

More interesting is this screenshot from a tool that lets you check the full URLs behind short ones. It apparently redirects to http://artcan-developpmement.fr/tw.html. Very odd.

Update: Nils Geylen posted the following in the comments section, highlighting that attackers look to have compromised a legitimate French furniture website and then loaded forwarding scripts to take users to a number of different malicious domains which look to serve malware:

http://artcan-developpement.fr (without the extra m: oppement instead of oppmement) is a regular French site selling design furniture of some sort. The bit after the slash of course redirects to various exe or php files on several other domains (e.g. detecproforyou.us/twit.php or robsearch.info/tre/sena.exe) then results in a 404 for that file. But at the source for that page and it’s empty. Tried this on a secondary Linux machine. Not sure what was supposed to happen.

Update 2: There are a number of tweets showing up in many users’ streams that are advertising the service Fllwrs, all links are cloaked using the Goo.gl domain shortener. The tweet read as follows:

Just found the easiest way to track who follows and unfollows you – http://goo.gl/kLE5M

We have spoken with the developers at Fllwrs and have been assured that the tweet was a by-product of code used for testing purposes and has now been resolved. The service is not malicious, it just sent out a lot of automated messages recommending people to use the service.

Remember, if you have think your Twitter account may have been compromised by a service, you should head to Twitter.com and revoke its access.

To do this, head into: Settings -> Connections -> Find the app and REVOKE ACCESS!