Anatomy of a Twitter False Flag-Spam and Dox Attack

Recently an alarming number of Twitter users have been suspended for doing nothing wrong.  This originally started in April as reported by the conservative news site Human Events and has begun to recently spiral out of control beyond the realm of politics and simple account suspensions.

The original attack is quite simple - get enough Twitter users to report a user for spam...and the target user's account is suspended.  According to Human Events this attack was originally being used by left wing liberals to silence right wing conservatives for expressing their views.  While I will not get into the political issues of this and why this goes against freedom of speech...something I will mention is that a "defense network" is being built to help protect against these attacks.

Warning: Potentially Malicious "Unfollow" Twitter App

Twitter users have recently begun receiving spam claiming to be an "unfollow app" capable of telling you who has stopped following you on Twitter.

Since this "app" is being advertised via spam, it should of course be treated as suspect.

The spam uses multiple redirects to fool scanners:

First Redirect Destination Analysis:  (Clean)
https://www.virustotal.com/url/7ad5fc516c4a9a4689de1e5de82c90681bb95f998c2ff1a0bfce180324d44fbb/analysis/1334255656/

Second Redirect Destination Analysis: (Potentially damaging content per Websense Threatseeker)
https://www.virustotal.com/url/dbfafb76973527e77be5e8e15f30ea7734b4a6cffed2d403c32fff16c69adf34/analysis/


At the very least, this is most likely a scam to get social networking impressions.  Chances are fairly high, however, that this could be malicious software.

If you receive any spam advertising this (or any other app), report the account to Twitter and they will deal with it accordingly.