You may have seen a number of tweets circulating over the first few hours mentioning “Acai Berries”. Users are reporting that their accounts are tweeting out spam messages containing these words without their consent.
The attack, first reported as a ‘worm’ by Mashable, may actually, it appears, be related to this weekend’s hacking of Gawker Media’s database. @Delbius, leader of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team says: “Got a Gawker acct that shares a PW w/your Twitter acct? Change your Twitter PW. A current attack appears to be due to the Gawker compromise.”
If true (and you’d expect Twitter staff to be in a good position to judge such things) it’s likely to have affected anyone with the same password and email address for their Gawker and Twitter accounts. If you fit that bill, we recommend you change passwords on both accounts immediately.
The fallout from yesterday’s hack of the Gawker Media database has so far seen goodwilled coders send out warning emails to those concerned. This Twitter worm, if related, is the first time we’ve seen the hack exploited.
Twitter seems fairly certain that the two incidents are related. It has now tweeted warnings from its @support and @spam accounts. We’ve contacted Twitter for further comment.
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Oh, and if you’re wondering about the odd image choice, that’s actually Acai pulp being separated from Acai seeds at a market in Brazil.
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