Like most social media sites, Twitter is no stranger to malicious activity. Jacob Morgan summarizes an attack on Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang that occurred a few days ago. Apparently someone was running a bot that monitors popular Twitter accounts and then uses spoofed accounts appearing to reciprocate following new users. The bot uses fake accounts with one letter of the user name positioned differently than the legitimate account, just like intentionally misspelling a legitimate domain name. I received a follower notification from one of these fake accounts claiming to be Jeremiah. By the time I got around to investigating and blocking it, Twitter had already suspended the account and its fake siblings before I had been twammed with fake direct messages. Darn; I would liked to have been able to add "twammed" to my resume under "Experience."
So what does this mean for companies using Twitter or thinking about piloting some Twitter accounts? It's Media Monitoring 101. You have to monitor your brand and products on the Web even if you do not have plans to leverage a particular communication technology. By definition, social networks propograte geometrically (no, not virally), which makes social media monitoring all the more challenging. Larger companies in particular should consider employing media monitoring services which are focused on social media, like those from Visible Technologies or TNS Cymfony, or at least verify their PR agency employs such monitoring services.
UPDATE: Here's the actual follower message I received. You really do have to look at these follower notification closely to detect a malicious account. As I said, to Twitter's credit, they had this account deactivated very quickly.
Hi, Tim Hickernell (thickernell).
Jeremiah (jowayang) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out Jeremiah's profile here:
http://twitter.com/jowayang
You may follow Jeremiah as well by clicking on the "follow" button.
Best,
Twitter
Posted by: Tim Hickernell | February 20, 2009 at 15:52