I was a victim of social media’s darker side today, it was unpleasant, time consuming and a nasty surprise. It is actually quite embarassing and I should have known better, if it had been an email it wouldn’t have happened….

I saw a tweet in Hootsuite that mentioned Kew Creative. The tweet had a link in it, so what did I do? Yes, clicked on it. To be fair, the link was the usual shortened link we are all acustomed to seeing in Hootsuite. The link opened a webpage or rather tried to but as the link was actually an exe file and the webpage was blank. My anti-virus alerted me to the exe file and I closed everything immediately. My anti-virus said it had quarantined 2 trojan horses. Ok I thought, phew, close shave.

I used the anti-viurs software to delete the 2 trojan horses but I noticed something pop into the task bar – Antimalware Doctor, which said my anti-virus was turned off. I checked and the anti-virus said it was enabled. Strange I thought. Then Internet Explorer kept trying to open a page but couldn’t go to it. Even stranger as I hadn’t asked IE to open in the first place. I did some Google searching and discovered Antimalware Doctor is a rogue anti-spyware progrm that is installed through malware. So the cheeky exe file had done some damage! I followed some instructions on how to remove the rogue and re-started my PC. This took over 8 hours, yes 8 hours! I was still able to use my PC but with some frustration. To remove the rogue I had to download MalwareBytes which would scan the hard drives for infected files, it was this scan that took the time as my PC has a lot of data on it. I had to do the scan twice but in the end I think it has found and removed all instances of malware, hopefully.

With this in mind here are my top tips for protecting yourself from Twitter spammers:

• Never Ever click on links within Tweets from people you don’t know!
• If you’re mentioned by someone you don’t know, go to their profile to see what tweets they’ve posted, are they following thousands but only have a few or no one following them, is their bio and location complete?
• Use the ‘report spamming’ link – this lets Twitter know someone is suspected of foul play so they can decide whether to suspend the account.
• Read up on how Twitter and Hootsuite protect users from spam

I have certainly been surprised by this episode, it’s the first time I’ve encountered Twitter and Hootsuite being used for malware attacks. It has also highlighted how easy it is to spread viruses and malware through the use of shortened URL’s. Beware!