QUOTE
by Chester Wisniewski on March 30, 2011
Filed Under: Featured, Social networks, Spam
Twitter users are being bombarded with messages suggesting that Jackie Chan has met his tragic end.
For the last several hours "RIP Jackie Chan" has been a trending topic with many people helping the spammers spread their messages. It appears to be a crude attempt to use Twitter users to boost the SEO of some spammy websites.
While the URLs have been shifting around, they are all obviously garbage once you arrive and their is no attempt to further convince you that something horrible has happened to Mr. Chan.
[attachment=14402:6.png]
It appears the whole idea that Jackie Chan is no more started out as a bit of a joke. The two primary spam bots that seem to be tweeting it out now likely picked it up from someone elses feed.
There are a large quantity of spam bots involved in this scheme and by selecting the words "RIP Jackie Chan" they've made it popular enough to make it a trending topic.
If you look at the screenshot you can see that the spam bots are integrating several other trending topics of the moment such as #honestly.
I expect Twitter are working on shutting down all of these spam bots, but in the mean time don't click any of these links. While they are non-malicious at the moment, this could change at any time.
Filed Under: Featured, Social networks, Spam
Twitter users are being bombarded with messages suggesting that Jackie Chan has met his tragic end.
For the last several hours "RIP Jackie Chan" has been a trending topic with many people helping the spammers spread their messages. It appears to be a crude attempt to use Twitter users to boost the SEO of some spammy websites.
While the URLs have been shifting around, they are all obviously garbage once you arrive and their is no attempt to further convince you that something horrible has happened to Mr. Chan.
[attachment=14402:6.png]
It appears the whole idea that Jackie Chan is no more started out as a bit of a joke. The two primary spam bots that seem to be tweeting it out now likely picked it up from someone elses feed.
There are a large quantity of spam bots involved in this scheme and by selecting the words "RIP Jackie Chan" they've made it popular enough to make it a trending topic.
If you look at the screenshot you can see that the spam bots are integrating several other trending topics of the moment such as #honestly.
I expect Twitter are working on shutting down all of these spam bots, but in the mean time don't click any of these links. While they are non-malicious at the moment, this could change at any time.
http://nakedsecurity...-twitter-users/
