Telecommunications giant Telstra has had its Twitter account hacked, with the culprit using the account to spread links designed to gain individual account names and user passwords.
Telstra BigPond, the department dedicated to selling broadband, uses a Twitter account to interact with the 1,866 “followers” signed up to its tweet feed.
The messages included text such as “hey, look at this”, with a link included that takes the user to a phishing site that looks identical to the BigPond page, but is designed to steal user names and passwords.
“Someone, identity unknown, used the BigPond Twitter account to send unauthorised DMs [direct messages] to some of our followers,” Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton told The Age. “The incident is under investigation with Twitter and we have advised our followers not to open the DM.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
