Wendy Schollum: Quick Tweeters catch View worm

Ashton Kutcher, one of the world's most followed celebrity Tweeters and host of the celebrity pranking show Punk'd, found himself the victim of digital pranksters last week, when computer hackers broke into his Twitter account and posted a message to his 6.3 million followers, telling him that his Twitter account was "not secure".
While Kutcher's Twitter account was penetrated by the determined will of a group of hackers, it is an unfortunate truth that many personal and professional Twitter accounts are hijacked simply through naivety and lack of online security education.
The most current example of a Twitter threat that is spread through poor online account management is the Tweet Viewer worm.
The worm is spread by offering to reveal, to a Twitter user, who has been visiting their Twitter profile (something most people would be interested in knowing) and prompting them to click on a link that ends with the phrase "tweetviewer".
The link itself is not what causes the account hack. Rather, the worm preys on the user's curiosity by asking them (as many Twitter related applications do) to give the application authorisation to access their Twitter account, it then uses this access to tweet the same offer (to find out who is viewing their Twitter account) to all their followers - without the account holders consent to do so.
Like so many of Twitter's fastest spreading worms, viruses and scams, the Tweet Viewer worm relies on people's over-enthusiastic willingness to give an application access to their Twitter profile - essentially providing a security "back door" into their account and, in some cases, the ability for that application to do anything it likes with that account.
As yet, the only activity the Tweet Viewer worm has undertaken is to try to encourage more people to give the application access to their accounts.
However, anyone who has already given this application access should act now to block it, in order to ensure more malicious activity (such as a full account hijacking or twitter spamming) doesn't take place later.
To block this application, log in to your Twitter account, go to the Connections tab (under Account Settings) and click the Revoke Access link under any application that you think looks suspicious, or you no longer want to have access to your account (eg Tweet Viewer).
When so much of our lives are lived out online, and so much of our personal and professional interactions are influenced by the information found about us online, it is important that you protect your social media accounts by limiting the access of gimmicky and potentially malicious applications.
The next time you are prompted to give an application access to your Twitter or Facebook account, take the time to search for more information about that application on search engines and be discerning about which ones you give account access to.
Wendy Schollum is a web strategist and managing director of Xplore.net Solutions Ltd (www.xplore.net). If you would like to learn more about protecting your social media accounts, join Wendy on Facebook (www.facebook.com/xploreNET), follow the Xplore.net team on Twitter (www.twitter.com/xploreNET) or call 0800 100 900.