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Crooks take advantage of Twitter woes to target consumers

Cyber criminals have taken advantage of recent media coverage and public interest in the online security issues affecting micro-blogging site Twitter, an internet security firm has stated.

Twitter has been in the headlines in the past few days due to a cross-site scripting worm, created by a 17-year-old teenager called 'Mikeyy', that is said to have affected thousands of account holders.

Cyber crooks are now targeting people looking for information on the online threats affecting the site, according to security firm Trend Micro, which has spotted malicious links on search engines.

The company says internet users who key the words 'Twitter worm' or 'Mikeyy' among other related terms on Google will find "a link that connects the user to a malicious URL", which downloads malware.

According to Trend Micro, the link "loads a JavaScript which is detected as JS_DLOADR.NIB and also links users to a URL that leads to other malicious downloads.

Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney admitted to authoring two of the worms that hit Twitter out of boredom.

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