'Tweet Viewer' Virus Spreads On Twitter

WOW! You can see WHO VISITS your TWITTER profile. That's cool! – http://bit.ly/tweetviewer—
Edwin (@deventweet) March 05, 2011

I just viewed my TOP20 Profile STALKERS. I can't believe my EX is still checking me every day – http://bit.ly/tweetviewer—
Syndicated Tech (@syndicatedtech) March 05, 2011

There is something amazing about how desperately humans want to see who has viewed their online profiles. This desire has been taken advantage of (again) by Twitter spammers as tweets like “WOW! You can see WHO VISITS your TWITTER profile. That’s cool! – http://bit.ly/tweetviewer” and “I just viewed my TOP20 Profile STALKERS. I can’t believe my EX is still checking me every day” are proliferating this morning, at about 159 tweets a minute.

The “See Who Viewed Your Profile” application preys upon this exact curiosity, asking users for Twitter oAuth, and then using that authorization to tweet out the above. And while it’s not clear that it’s doing anything behind the scenes, at the moment it is definitely using the access granted to spread itself. Once again: Don’t click on any http://bit.ly/tweetviewer links, and if you do, immediately revoke the application’s access to your account by going to Settings > Connections > Revoke Access.

Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Del Harvey recommends the same, here.

If you clicked (even though you knew the link was bogus), you gotta revoke access to the app. Help page: http://t.co/TjSCpcL—
Del Harvey (@delbius) March 05, 2011

Access revoked, password changed. Damn iPhone usage of Twitter. Clicked on a link before I knew what it was. #fawk—
Mark Suster (@msuster) March 05, 2011

Update: Bit.ly has blocked the domains hosting the links, but as long as the app has Twitter permissions it continue to spread with a new short link. Here are the Bit.ly stats of the original link’s trajectory.

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

Company: Twitter

Website: twitter.com

Launch Date: March 21, 2006

Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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