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Goo.gl fake Antivirus Worm being targating Twitter & Twitter Users by a Malicious Worm. This Fake Goo.gl Antivirus send out a tweet with a goo.gl shortened URL link, which will be directed to a rogue Antivirus Application. The attack demonstrates once again how URL shortening can be a Pandora’s box as users click on links with no clue where they might lead.
Sophos Graham Cluley’s “Post on Naked Security” describes the threat. Without any Twitter user permission, their accounts have been tweeting out malicious links, this was facing by thouands of Twitter Users and found. The Popular micro-blogging Network finds many tweets which contain no message other than a goo.gl shortened link (Google’s equivalent to bit.ly or tinyurl), which points to a URL ending with “m28sx.html”.
Adam Wosotowsky, Principle Researcher at McAfee Labs Explained :- “Shortened URL sites are not 100 percent malicious, so blocking the domain completely can cause false positives, which is something researchers try and avoid. Goo.gl is an example of a site associated with Google, so blocking the domain may be frowned upon by Google, allowing the spammer to continually abuse the site.”
Wosotowsky elaborates, “As we stated in our 2011 Threat Predictions, we currently track and analyze–through multiple social media applications and all URL shortening services–more than 3,000 shortened URLs per minute. We see a growing number of these used for spam, scamming and other malicious purposes, and we expect to see shortened URL abuse invade all other forms of Internet communications.”
While Shrtened URLs provide attackers a simple, easy and commonly accepted way of obscuring Malicious Links. So, McAfee recommends to use their properietary URL shortening Service “mcaf.ee“, so that they can be scanned and filtered to weed out Malware.
Tweetdeck offers an option to reveal the full-length link behind the shortened URL before visiting it and this will be the best and better tool to avoid falling Victim to Trojans and other Malicious Attacks, which are hiding behind innocent-looking Shrtened URLs.
Thanks to PCworld.com for giving me information on this Goo.gl Fake Antivirus Worm on Twitter.