Beware of Phishing and Spam on Twitter

 Technology  No Responses »
Apr 092012
 

Twitter Spam

Recently, the phishing attempts are happening again as seen above from my twitter account. Those who had received such direct messages and have given their account details should change their passwords immediately.

Scammers are also taking advantage of tweets in a way similar to how they rely on Internet search engines – they create Tweets that include keywords in them. Similar to how websites are designed to gain visibility through search engine optimization, scammers use Tweets that require less effort. For example, new Tweets appearing at the top in the search results list for the most recent Tweets.

Twitter Spam

There are about 100 accounts tweeting around 300 Tweets with bad links every hour. Twitter blocks suspected malware URLs and flags suspected harmful shortened URLs. However some users may be directed to sites when clicking on the malicious links using smartphones. Users are typically informed that they have completed registration for a paid video service and ask that payment be made. These sites display information such as IP addresses, customer IDs, and browsers used to access the page to make the user believe that the site owner can track them down.

So beware before you click on any links on twitter. Check out Norton Mobile Security for Android 2.2 or later. You can download it here at the Google Play store.

Beware of Phishing and Spam on Twitter

 Technology  1 Response »
Apr 092012
 

Twitter Spam

Recently, the phishing attempts are happening again as seen above from my twitter account. Those who had received such direct messages and have given their account details should change their passwords immediately.

Scammers are also taking advantage of tweets in a way similar to how they rely on Internet search engines – they create Tweets that include keywords in them. Similar to how websites are designed to gain visibility through search engine optimization, scammers use Tweets that require less effort. For example, new Tweets appearing at the top in the search results list for the most recent Tweets.

Twitter Spam

There are about 100 accounts tweeting around 300 Tweets with bad links every hour. Twitter blocks suspected malware URLs and flags suspected harmful shortened URLs. However some users may be directed to sites when clicking on the malicious links using smartphones. Users are typically informed that they have completed registration for a paid video service and ask that payment be made. These sites display information such as IP addresses, customer IDs, and browsers used to access the page to make the user believe that the site owner can track them down.

So beware before you click on any links on twitter. Check out Norton Mobile Security for Android 2.2 or later. You can download it here at the Google Play store.

Singaporean’s Online Social Behaviour in 2011

 Technology  2 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

Experian has released their analysis of web searches by Singapore Internet users in 2011, providing interesting insights into Singaporean social habits online. There are some interesting findings in 5 different areas.

Social media
  • Facebook continues to be the most popular social media platform with website traffic of almost 32 per cent.
  • YouTube peaked at second place with almost 21 per cent share of visits.
  • Followed by the increasing popularity of Google+ at almost 16 per cent, up from 1.2 per cent in August 2011.
  • Microblogging and community forums such as Twitter and Singapore HardwareZone Community are also gaining ground in the category with a combined website traffic of 6.67 per cent.
Shopping
  • UK fashion brand ASOS has surfaced as the top website at 13.22 per cent share of visits in the fashion and lifestyle category
  • Forever 21 only has 4.03 per cent share which has a physical store in Singapore.
  • Love Bonito, which claims the title of most popular Singapore blog shop, has a visit share of 2.89 per cent in the category.
Group-buying sites
  • Groupon Singapore and Deal.com.sg are the top two deals aggregators, accounting for 35.25 per cent of website traffic of sub-category rewards and directories.
Electronics
Celebrity and music
  • Singaporeans prove to be unwavering fans of K-Pop as clearly shown by 65.49 per cent combined share of visits on the following websites within the Music Band and Artists category: Entertainment on xinmsn, AllKPOP.com and Wonderful Generation, resonating the popularity of the Korean boy and girl bands’ concerts held in Singapore last year.
  • Celebrity websites in Singapore are dominated by the K-pop fan community as well. One of these websites is Soshified.com with 50.37 per cent share of visits.
Show Press Release (1,095 More Words)

Retrieving Twitter Search Feeds into Excel or Google Spreadsheet

 Technology  1 Response »
Nov 232011
 

Recently I had the fine opportunity to figure out how to search and compile all the tweets into a spreadsheet, be it Excel or Google Spreadsheets. So I’m going to document this down for the benefit of everyone.

There are 3 steps to doing this:

  1. Getting the search data using the Twitter API
  2. Using that as a data source in Excel or Google Spreadsheet
  3. Populating and saving the data
1. Getting the search data using the Twitter API

For those not so computer savvy, this just means that you’re identifying where the data is for Excel or Google Spreadsheet to suck in the data from. It’s better if you use Google Chrome for this, because Internet Explorer will try to automatically download some of these files instead of displaying them.

Firstly, type the following in your browser:

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=<YOUR SEARCH>[/code]

where <YOUR SEARCH> is what you want to search for (can include spaces too), without the angle brackets “<” and “>”. This should give you 15 results back. If you want more results, you can add the following in your browser:

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=<YOUR SEARCH>&rpp=100[/code]

where  rpp means the number of results you want to get back. The maximum is 100 per search only. So what happens if you want more than 100? Then you do the following:

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=<YOUR SEARCH>&rpp=100&page=2[/code]

where page is the page number. So page=2 will return the next 101 to 200, page=3 will return the next 201 to 300, and so on.

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=justinlee&rpp=100

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=justinlee&rpp=100&page=2[/code]

Save all these links, as above, somewhere once you’ve verified all the data you want to get back. We’re going to use these links so that Excel or Google Spreadsheet can suck up this data.

For more complex searches, check out Twitter Search API.

2. Using that as a data source in Excel or Google Spreadsheet

So now you’ve determined where these data are located (based on the links you’ve just saved), now we can use Excel or Google Spreadsheet to grab these data.

First, let’s take a look at using Excel 2010. Note that Excel 2011 for Mac is unable to do this, so you’ll have to fall back to Google Spreadsheet.

Go to the “Data” tab and select “From Web”. Now paste the FIRST link you’ve created just now and “Import Data”. You’ll get to choose which cell you want the data to be imported to, and done. You’ll see all your twitter data populated into your Excel sheet. Now proceed to the next step.

For Google Spreadsheet, the caveat is you can only import 20 rows at a time, so remember to set your “rpp=20″.

Select the cell you want to start populating your data in, and type the following in the cell:

[code]=ImportFeed("")[/code]

Now proceed to the next step.

3. Populating and saving the data

Now that you’ve populated the 1st page, it’s time to put in all your data.

For BOTH Excel and Google Spreadsheet, you should copy and paste the data to another sheet before repeating step 2. After you’ve duplicated the data to another sheet, then REPEAT STEP 2 with the next link you have.

After you’re done importing all the data, you can start analyzing your Twitter data with your Excel/Spreadsheet magic. Have fun!

If This Then That (ifttt.com) – Creating Automated Tasks for your Internet Life

 Technology  2 Responses »
Oct 112011
 

If This Than That is probably one of the most interesting sites that help automated simple tasks on the internet using the basic conditional logic, where a trigger happens, an action takes place.

There are many pre-existing channels you can use like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox just to name a few, to link a channel’s trigger to another channel’s action, you can pretty much create practically any automated tasks of your life on the internet.

It is simple enough, you don’t need any programming background at all. Just basic conditional logic to define what you want to achieve.

Check it out at http://ifttt.com.

U.R.G.E. by Anonymous – Hijacking Trending Topics on Twitter

 Security, Technology  No Responses »
Sep 122011
 

I’m sure you’ve all should have heard about Anonymous, if you haven’t you’ve been living under a rock. Anonymous has released a windows application to hijack trending topics on twitter. This is used for spreading the word of Anonymous’ activities. This is not a hacking tool nor is it an exploit tool, it was created to make it easier for them to tweet faster without copying and pasting constantly.

You can download this program HERE (Windows-Beta)

You will need .NET Framework 4 to run this program. You can get it: HERE

U.R.G.E Users Manual

Source Code

Beware of Twitter Phishing Attack (WARNING)

 Security, Technology  2 Responses »
Sep 052011
 

There’s a twitter phishing attack going around that’s being passed through DM. The url posted is “http://itwitier.com/login/sessions/” – please do not log in there. Those accounts that are compromised will send this DM to their friends:

If you do receive this DM from your friends, please inform your friends that their twitter accounts have been “phished” and should change their passwords IMMEDIATELY.

Learn more about “Phishing” on Wikipedia.

Sina Weibo vs. Twitter – HP Labs Discovers Vast Differences in Social Media User Behaviors

 Technology  Comments Off
Jul 152011
 

HP Labs has recently done some research on Social Media User Behavior, monitoring both Sina Weibo (the microblogging service in China) and Twitter (everyone else). HP Labs found vast differences between the user behavior of people (who are mainly Chinese) using Sina Weibo and Twitter.

For the experiment, HP Labs scientists examined the topics that are most popular on Sina Weibo during a 30-day period and compared them to previous findings from research on Twitter.

In China, people tend to use Sina Weibo to share entertainment-type content such as jokes, images, and videos, and a significantly large percentage of posts are “retweets” (a re-posting of another user’s tweet).  The trends that are formed are almost entirely caused by retweets of this kind of content.

In contrast, prior HP Labs research shows that trending topics on Twitter have more to do with current events than entertainment and that the effect of retweets is not as large (although it is still substantial).

You can check out the HP Labs research paper for more information - What Trends in Chinese Social Media.

Find HP in social media… in China and around the world
HP on Twitter and Facebook: @hpnews, @hp, @hplabs, facebook.com/hp
HP on Sina Weibo: www.weibo.com/hpchina
China HP blog: www.hp.com.cn/hpchinablog

Google+ is the Glue between the Google Services (Part 1)

 Articles, Publications, Technology  3 Responses »
Jul 142011
 

Google launched Google+ just a few weeks ago, and it has boomed into a relentless hunger from the Social Media scene to be on the newest and hottest social media platform from one of the most popular brands on the planet, Google. However, I still hear a lot of people asking what exactly is Google+, why they should want to be on it, and how to use Google+. Well, I’m going to try to answer all those questions, and talk about what will become possible in future for Google with this new Google+ social media platform.

Be forewarned, this is a pretty heavy article. Read on after the break. Continue reading »

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