May 10th, 2009
Easily spam Twitter with trending topics API
Last night while scanning the Twitterverse, my buddy Josh noticed that every trending topic was being bombarded with nasty spam.
With Twitter’s trends API, you can easily scan the feed for hot topics, run a spam bot to register usernames, and retweet the trending hashtag with phishing links.
So the new sidebar feature that lists trending topics and offers live search could be dangerous now. Be careful, and if something looks spammy, don’t click. Hopefully Twitter gets a handle on this soon.
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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