December 9th, 2008
Vint Cerf's Twitter account hacked, suspended for spam
(UPDATE: Cerf denies that this was his Twitter profile) It appears that Vint Cerf, the father of Internet who needs no introduction, has had his Twitter account compromised, with a multitude of spam messages posted on his behalf during the last 24 hours, all of which are redirecting to auction search sites (baysearch .net and soldly .com). Cerf joined Twitter as of November this year according to the Daily Follow, with his account currently suspended due to the automated fashion in which the spam messages were posted. Shame on them.
The automated suspension appears to have been triggered because identical messages were posted within one minute interval for several hours such as :
“Have you heard about”
“My friend mentioned”
“Can’t stop thinking about”
“Have you seen”
This is not your typical high profile incident or yet another web malware exploitation kit released in the wild with Christmas promotion. This is pure irony, as the spammers that took control of the account and started spamming from it, wouldn’t exist at the first place if it wasn’t him who made it possible for them to blossom.
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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