It’s going around again. The Direct Message on Twitter says “You seen what this person is saying about you? (Link removed) terrible things..”
I have seen this a few times today on Twitter. I really don’t think I am that popular yet, nor have I urinated in a lot of people’s cereal this morning either, that I should be seeing the above message over and over again today.
What is happening is that people have clicked the link to see what bad things others have said and …bam…”They are infected with a virus that uses their Twitter account to send out these messages”.
Some words to the wise, “don’t click on the link”. Just delete the Direct Message (DM). And by the way, go and change your Twitter password while you are at it. It would not hurt to do a full virus scan either.
These viruses use generic messages in hope that many people will click on them. I have alerted those who have sent this to me to perform the above steps.
Lessons to take away from this experience:
- Don’t click on everything that has a hyperlink
- When in doubt about whether sender really did send this, contact the sender to verify that they did purposely send it
- If you get infected, login into the affected site and change your password as soon as possible
- Make sure there is no gift left behind on your device by doing a virus scan
You have to protect all your accounts by acting wisely at all times. Don’t be click happy and click on everything that gets in front of you.
This post was written by
Jeff Brown helps businesses market their produces and services by providing social media training that works. He is the President of Alpha Social Media Inc and a certified Workplace Education trainer. Jeff is also a social media speaker, a consultant, and the author of "Essential Twitter Skills for Business".
