Twitter wrestles with fourth worm attack

Another worm attack early Monday on Twitter kept the micro-blogging Web service chasing down infected accounts and deleting rogue tweets.

"Late Sunday night and into the wee hours of Monday we fought off a fourth attack," said Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, in an update to a blog post he originally published Sunday. "Once again, we secured the compromised accounts and deleted any material that would further propagate the worm."
The newest attack -- which followed a pair of worms Saturday and a third Sunday -- originated from a just-registered account labeled

"cleaningUpMikey," said F-Secure Corp.'s chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen. Today's copycat worm infected account profiles of people who clicked on the sender's name or image in tweets like, "How TO remove new Mikeyy worm! RT!! http://bit.ly/yCL1S."

"A message like this is particularly nasty, as there were plenty of re-tweets of this malicious message sent by genuine users," Hypponen said in a blog posting just minutes after Monday's attack began. "The bit.ly link got redirected back to Twitter, to user reberbrerber's profile & which would infect Twitter users who viewed it."

Twitter has since deleted the cleaningUpMikey account and the tweets it and other infected accounts spawned.

Also on Monday, Twitter again emphasized that while the worm attacks have been a nuisance, they haven't stolen any user account information. "No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this renewed attack," the service's status page said early this morning.

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