Twitter phishing scam may be spreading

I use twitter all the time. I have a ring of about 75 drivers that I keep in touch with. The key to safe twittering is to keep your profile "protected"

When you keep it protected, your posts do not show in the general timeline which is where a lot of phishers get the id's to scam.

Also when you keep your account protected, you can control who can see your tweets. When your updates are protected, people must be in your "followers". You can control this because when users want to follow you, YOU must grant them access to your posts. If you don't let them follow you, they can never see your posts and you will never see thier posts. Hence they cannot "Phish" you

I have about 80 followers that I allow to interact with me on twitter. I have no problems with these folks because I know what thier patterns of postings are and what thier content is. You have the option of previewing the posts of someone who wants to follow you providing thier account is not protected. If thier account is not protected, then you can see what kind of content they post. Then you can decide whether or not you want to follow them.

If thier account IS protected, you have the option of refusing them or you can "follow" them and let them allow you to follow them. Once that happens, then you can see thier content. If you don't like what they post or you have a problem with them at a later date, you can "Block" them. Once you block someone, they can never see your posts or you can see thiers

As a general rule, phishers do not protect thier account as they want everyone to see what they are phishing for and to see whatever links they post.

Usually Phishers are identified within a day or so and most of them are removed from the system at any rate. You can easily identify phishers by looking at thier profile before you allow them to follow you. The key is in looking at how many people they follow and how many are following them. A good example would be "Following 3098 and 24 followers" and has a single post, usually something like "Come to my site" and a blind URL Thats how twitter identifies them and removes thier account.

Blind URLs...Whats that you say?

Once you have a twitter account, you can post whatever you want. There is no censorship or limits on what you can post. you can post links to whatever sites you want. As twitter only allows messages of 140 characters or less, to post a long URL, some people use URL shrinking services like TinyURL or IS.GD or something similar.

These services take a long url that may have 40 to 80 characters and gives it another URL which is much shorter. For example I took http://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum and used the the TinyURL service to shorten the link to http://tinyurl.com/k79gj When you click on that link, it will take you to the front page of the forum. (moderators, I only posted this as an example)

The inherent danger of this in Twitter is that this is essentially a blind link, meaning you can't see where the link will take you. a Phisher will use this saying "Click this link to win your new computer!!!!!" and when you click it, you are taken to a site with malware virii and all other sorts of unpleasantness. It can be dangerous.

I treat links in twitter like I treat links in my email. If it comes from someone I know and trust, I have no problem following the link through. If it comes from one of my new followers, I don't click the link. I usually wait 3 to 6 months before I trust someone enough to follow thier links through. I haven't been snared yet.

There are a lot of twitter "apps" which I use to work with twitter. One of them is brightkite. That is a photo storage site which is linked to your twitter account. When you post or email a photo to brightkite, it cross posts it to your twitter account. it creates a post for youin your twitter account with a link back to the photo. which is very cool. TwitPic is another service that does the same thing. People can click on the links and they can comment on whatever you post.

I didn't mean to really make this a user guide to Twitter but I just sorta let it ramble. It can be a safe service to use if you use common sense and understand how to protect yourself if you choose to use the service. I hope I gave enough info to give you the ability to protect yourself.

Twitter is a lot of fun and the more followers/folling users you have, the better it is. It's like sitting in a big restaurant with all your friends and having a big conversation. I really enjoy it.