An older post, If Scoble Thinks He Found Bad Startup Marketing, He Ain’t Seen Nothing received several comments, all showing the same structure, pointing back to Twitter accounts – some are clearly spam accounts with only this one update, but others appear to be real users, although I am not following any of them.
lbfd (LBFD) | January 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm e
This is a test.
(This appears to be a spam account with no real content.)
aleslie2 (Art Leslie) | January 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm e
Hmmm … tweet completely disappeared. This is a test.
(This appears to be a real account.)
bisfourbritt (bisfourbritt) | January 13th, 2009 at 9:52 pm e
This is a test. Nd it ends with no friends. We will go on…..untl it hurts
Zonin with loud shit tonightt hah
(This appears to be a real account.)
radiomanmic (Michael Grider) | January 13th, 2009 at 11:28 pm e
This is a test. Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through.
(This appears to be a real account.)
deborahgtaylor (deborahgtaylor) | January 14th, 2009 at 6:10 am e
Is going to Brenham for a quilting lesson. This is a test.
(This appears to be a real account.)
cineola (cineola) | January 14th, 2009 at 7:14 am e
This is a test.
(This appears to be a spam account with no real content.)
Is there some new Twitter-to-Blog spam bot that I am not aware of?
Update: There’s more now, on another post:
lbfd (LBFD) | January 13th, 2009 at 6:58 pm e
This is a test.
aleslie2 (Art Leslie) | January 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm e
Hmmm … tweet completely disappeared. This is a test.
bisfourbritt (bisfourbritt) | January 13th, 2009 at 9:52 pm e
This is a test. Nd it ends with no friends. We will go on…..untl it hurts
Zonin with loud shit tonightt hah
radiomanmic (Michael Grider) | January 13th, 2009 at 11:28 pm e
This is a test. Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through.
deborahgtaylor (deborahgtaylor) | January 14th, 2009 at 6:10 am e
Is going to Brenham for a quilting lesson. This is a test.
cineola (cineola) | January 14th, 2009 at 7:14 am e
This is a test.
sztelzer (Rodrigo Sztelzer) | January 14th, 2009 at 11:18 am e
Só bebo tequila. This is a test.This is a test.
http://tinyurl.com/7jww4a Só beberei tequila.
In the meantime I disabled the Tweetbacks WordPress Plugin, which had not properly installed anyway, to see if it has anything to do with the attack.
Update: Follow-up thoughts @ CloudAve.
Related posts:
I wrote about this the other day on The Inquisitr (http://www.inquisitr.com/14973/is-tweetbacks-getting-spammed-already/ ) and even though the author of Tweetbacks did get back to me and did issue a couple of updates in the following days the problem persisted to the point one day I deleted close to 700 tweetbacks.
I’ve since then uninstalled it on my home blog and haven’t had any since. The thing that has me wonderiong though if rather than be a cause of the spam tweets Trackbacks is only showing how prevelant the problem is on Twitter – that may be the more important question to be asking.
700? Ouch… I guess I am lucky to have received only a dozen or so in this short period.
That was my account mentioned above. Plus, if you notice they all seemed to have something related to
“this is a test”. Must be something to do with how Tweetback works. Not familiar with it myself.
I also had over 300 in such a short period it was incredable. Disables the feature now anyway
i ever got 500 spam message in one days ,,, twitter start going worse since some spammers use it for marketing tools.