Apologies to everyone that received a spam message from my richard.arblaster gmail account, it seems that my account had been infiltrated by a spam/phishing bot.

The password was changed last night.

Do not under any circumstances click the link contained within that email, just delete it.

As a precaution change your gmail password.

Rest assured that email was definitely NOT sent by me, I hate both types of spam the email/snail mail/leaflet and the real life meat variety.

Yes these sites that let you shorten a large cumbersome URL to a set of 4-6 characters, popularly used by twitter.

One such URL shortening service bit.ly was blocked by open dns (a very popular free DNS service). So everyone who was using open dns as their DNS servers were greeted by a warning page telling them it had been blocked as it was a phishing site.

It was fixed within half an hour of being reported. It would appear that the person(s) who reported the link, failed to realise it is a url shortening service and just reporting the bit.ly url would block every single site using this service.

So my suggestion is, don’t report the bit.ly link, report the link it re-directs to.

I have also suggested in a tweet to @opendns they educated those that report these bit.ly links to actually click through and note the link it re-directs to.

Before you jump up and down and say I’m crazy. You can install a firefox plugin that enables you to preview the site that bit.ly re-directs to, including the URL and the site contents.

Yes report such things, but please learn how to report them in a proper manner.

Came across a couple of DMs this morning about a free iPhone from helloiphones.com did some digging on google and came across this blog post http://www.twittertruth.com/?p=71 about it.

I think this a hangover from the funny blog phishing DM earlier.

According to the author these DMs are coming from the same compromised accounts. However this doesn’t work for UK twitter accounts you get a message to say you are not in the correct region and you re-directed to a flash games site.

I still changed my password as a precaution.

Let me know if you clicked the link and tell me what happened and if you got the same images as posted in the above blog post.

Please get a grip on reality, your scam isn’t going to work, word gets round quickly on Twitter. Those that innocently gave away their login credentials have already been given advised on how to change their passwords.

I do not know what you guys are trying to gain from doing this? Twitter is a place for getting to know each other, serious business is rarely discussed on here. It is done away from twitter once contact has been established.

For those of you not sure what the DMs contains:

“Hey look at this funny blog…”

I’m not going to post the link within, that’s what the DMs start with.

If you do click on the link, do not enter any details into the following page.

UPDATE:

The text of the DMs have been changed to read:

“fixed it.. hehe here is that blog i wanted to show you”

UPDATE 2:

There are a couple more variations on this DM circulating.

DM the compromised account and tell them to change their password if twitter hasn’t already reset it.

Make sure there is no sensitive information in your profile or tweets.