Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop fell victim to a Twitter hack yesterday. It’s ok. We’ve all done it once or twice when we wanted to know “what someone was saying about us”. But other high profile Twitter accounts seem to have fallen victim to the hack in the last few days, with more likely coming soon.
For those unfamiliar with the hack, it socially engineers you to click on a phishing link that swipes your Twitter details with something intriguing to get you over the line. “OMG you won’t believe what someone is writing about you”, is a popular one, followed by the link. It comes from other people you follow and presumably trust, so you click it, spreading the virus on to everyone on your Twitter list who you can DM.
Looking at Julie Bishop’s follow list reveals a bunch of high profile people who probably won’t know that they’re being scammed by someone posing as our Foreign Minister on Twitter.
She follows almost 700 people, all of whom probably follow her back. That means she’s been DM spamming every single one of them. Get ready for a week of genuine Twitter spam from our politicians.