Tweet and Meat – Could Spammers Exploit Twitter???

Author: patdude [18-05-2009 21:39]

It looks like those scumbag Spammers have found a new way to use and abuse Twitter, letting them harvest email addresses. It turns out that a simple query fired at Twitter Search returns large numbers of email addresses for spammers to harvest so they can sell wobbly bit enlargement utilities, dodgy genuine fake Swiss watches and our favourite, Nigerian get rich quick schemes.

Devious spam scammers could simply write a script to gathers email addresses, which if used properly could gather a hundred thousand email addresses in the space of a week. Searching for email addresses using search engines such as Google mightn’t be anything new, but Twitter is 100% real-time so there’s going to be lots of email addresses and they’re always going to be up to date, making our friend Twitter  super attractive to spammers.

So whats the moral of this sad tweet of woe?

Don’t put your email address in any tweets unless of course you want it to be searchable or have a fetish for canned meat products. Alternatively if you must post an email address, use either a disposable email address or set up a freemium address such as Google, hotmail or yahoo which can take the heat off your main email account.