Twitter used to control botnet

AN INSECURITY EXPERT investigating last week's Twitter attacks has stumbled across another security problem for the social notworking outfit.

According to AP, Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks said he found that a criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers.

The botnet was in Brazil and Nazario said he found a Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious websites where they could download programs that steal banking passwords.

He contacted Twitter and the account was shut down, however Nazario also found the same person was doing the same thing on an account with a Google service called Jaiku, which is similar to Twitter.

Google said the affected account was shut down so there was nothing to see here move along please.

Nazario said that the techniques being used were not rocket science but were effective. In the old days it used to be ICQ that was the tool of choice for hackers to control botnets. µ