Twitter shenanigans

Any regular reader’s out there will have got the gist long ago that we at PN Towers love Twitter. We’ve compiled Twitter lists, held Twitter events, written Twitter guides and talked about how Twitter is looking at monetization to name just a few ways we’ve expressed our Twitter-fu, so understandably we get a little concerned when it seems that people or brands are misusing our (current) favourite social network for their own devious ends. Which is what PC World currently stands accused of.

Over the past 24 hours or so one of the top trending topics on twitter has been #twitterpornnames, a meme in which people are combining the name of their first pet with either their first headteacher’s  surname, your mother’s maiden name or the first street upon which you lived. All of which may well also be the answers to security questions asked by your bank, or favourite retail website, as well as a way of coming up with an amusing pseudonym.

PC World kindly pointed out this may well be a phishing attack to people and advised them that if they had joined in the the online fun they should now go and update answers to security questions and change their passwords. All rather sensible, although it was then accused by What the Trend? as being the originator of the #tag purely so that it could then write the warning story and make cash from increased advertising revenue.

Now admittedly this could be true, I’ve done a bit of digging but can’t, as yet, find out from where the meme originated but it does strike one as being a rather far fetched and a slightly laborious way to build trafficbut stranger things have happened.  Of course human gullibility fallibility is always the biggest hole to patch in any security system, there are countless examples of people handing over passwords in return for sweeties as the perennial survey from InfoSec Europe reveals. However  could this mark the beginning of cynical companies/individuals perverting a fairly easily gamed system for their own ends, though Twitterettes do have their own form of swift justice, just think about how quickly tweets such as this…

…appeared when Skittles decided to divert its web site front page to a stream of any tweets that mention skittles. That was actually one of the more polite ones (if you are interested you can find the NSFW stuff with a quick google search)

So with that in mind it will be interesting to see if the accusation of shenanigans on PC World will be found to be true or not, and if in either case we’ll see an increase of cynical attempts at corporate twitter manipulation and what the backlash will be.