Don't Fall For Phishing On Twitter

I had written many posts before regarding Phishing. However, all of these were related to spam mails. For a change, here's one I got on Twitter.

Your pw is 2341. @ShrutiKaushikIT You scored 1 entry to our $10,000 contest (not a joke!). Go 2 our linky to claim.
— Prize Spectacular (@TweetLotto35534) August 11, 2014

Note: The actual embedded tweet is gone because the account is now suspended. You can see the message if you click on the date. 

Now, most of us might be familiar with these kind of messages popping up while surfing the internet, especially on a song download website, in my experience. We choose to ignore them, but the fact that quite a lot of contests and sweepstakes are hosted on Twitter each day, it might get some people into believing this. Although, even when they are holding a sweepstakes, they still ask you to do something, like a 'Follow & Retweet' or redirect you to their website where they ask you to register via email. Nobody tags random people that they've won. Never. That's a total spam.

Secondly, if we look further into this particular case, the account holder has 75 followers. Also, when I did visit the link mentioned in the account, it led me to a blogger blog which had the following column in the middle.

Now, you must note that it is not advisable for you to actually visit such links as they might lead you to malicious websites. If you're very curious to know as to which website the generally shortened URL leads to, you can expand the URL at http://longurl.org/.

Coming back, I went on the link and submitted random numbers to it, which led to this website.

It asks you to download iLivid Download Manager. Now, for those who don't know of it, it's a malware in disguise of a Download Manager. You can read this article for a detailed idea.

It's quite a harmful Virus which not just slows down your PC, infects it and could even crash it but also steals your information (Usernames, Passwords etc.) by recording your keystrokes.

Ignore it whenever you encounter this 'Download Manager' for your own good.

Anyway, coming back to our main topic here, any legitimate organisation holding a sweepstakes of such an unbelievably large cash prize, not having it's own website and such few followers is just not possible.

The bottom-line is that we always need to stay cautious while surfing the web, be it spam mails or spam tweets.

You can also read my other posts on Phishing mails to learn about the typical characteristics of one.
There are ones which try to convince you into submitting money as in the case of Fake Hyundai Job Call Letter and Fake Microsoft Job Offer Letter, while a few would try to steal your identity as in the following cases-

Fake 'Abba Queens Hotel' Job Offer Mail
Fake Audi Promo Program
People claiming to make you millionaire

How To Add A Click To Tweet Link To Your Blog Or Website

Wish to add a 'click to tweet' link for each one in a list of facts or something similar?
It's actually pretty simple.

Step 1:
Head over to http://www.linktotweet.com/. Write the tweet that you want to be displayed.
Note: If you are going to include a link in your tweet, you should first go to https://bitly.com/ and shorten the URL. Then copy and use the shortened URL in your text.

Once you're done crafting your tweet, click on Generate Link Button.

Step 2:
The needed link URL will be generated right below as shown.

Copy this URL and then use it wherever you wish to.

For instance, if I wish to add this 'click to tweet' link in my blog, I generally write the text TweetThis beside the sentence to be tweeted and link it to the URL generated as above, as I have done in this post, Interesting Facts About Microsoft That You Probably Didn't Know.

You could also try clicktotweet.com and clicktoshare.me  for the same purpose. However, my personal choice is linktotweet.com because it doesn't require login and is the simplest to use.

There is a also a feature to see the link-clicks statistics on your tweet entries without registering.

Courtesy to Zoran for mentioning this in the comments via blog.agile-code.com.

Just use your CODE, and combine it with http://www.linktotweet.com/s/CODE.

So, in our sample case here, if we visit: http://www.linktotweet.com/s/S4IOUIKN we can see the stats around visits and view other things.

However, if you register, you have the possibility to manage your tweet text and see more statistics not available for non-registered users.

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