Looking to Twitter For Blogging Popular Topics – Dangerous?
July 8th, 2009 by Steve
A few weeks ago, the World Health upped the swine flue to a staggering Phase 6, and not surprisingly, everyone was talking about it. A friend who’s running a health blog and uses Twitter (among other sources) for blogging popular topics called me up, sounding frantic. “I’ve been infected!”
“What?!?” The first thing on my mind was, of course, H1N1. I asked my friend how she got it.
“Not me, silly. My laptop. I was following a trending topic and got directed to a malware site.”
Apparently, spammers have been throwing up fake tweets that include a trending topic. When you search what the topic means to learn more about it, you get a huge volume of links thrown at you, making it extremely easy to accidentally click your way to a malware site.
According to Claire, the most common links to watch for are Twitterbest.mp and Zasaden.mp. Here’s how it’s possible to get infected yourself.
- You will see lots of tweets with the links in them.
- Once you click on a link, you’re then taken to a page where you’re asked to upgrade your Flash player or one or the other video software.
- You see nothing wrong with a free upgrade, so you initiate the download.
- The malware installs itself.
- You’ll see an error message, informing you that you have a virus and that you need the Fast Anti-Virus 2009 (or whatever it is they’re calling them these days) to remove it.
The goal of the scam? To get you to fork over $89 for a fake anti-virus program. A similar scam is being perpetrated via pictures searched over Twitter.
Does this mean you should give up using Twitter to help you in blogging popular stories? Not at all! I’ve always believed Twitter’s Trending Topics is a useful tool for researchers and marketers… and I still do.
The best – and to my mind the only – way to avoid being scammed is to be cautious of the links you click on. More generally and most importantly, never download anything from unknown sites. Trending Topics are a valuable tool for driving traffic to your site, but remember, anything that’s popular is most likely subject to being gamed. You can bet a month’s paycheck any trending topic you find is half-filled with coattail-riders, bandwagon-jumpers, and spammers who use the keywords to get onto the front page.
If you really enjoyed this article and would like to know more about blogging popular topics and how it can help you, click here!
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under blog assistant, blogging popular, blogging posts, im university, promote business online, what is blogging, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
