We were alerted of a new trending topic attack today on Twitter by a fellow threat researcher.  Like the past Twitter trending topic attacks, this one was heavily targeting recent news breaking items such as the suicide bombings in Moscow, as well as many other hot topics on the Internet today.

Correll unearthed some rather alarming statistics:

• 1,888 Twitter accounts (and growing) have been used to spread the attack URL
• 2,560 malicious tweets have been sent out
• The malicious links were clicked on 25,854 times
• 78% of victims came from the United States, 12% from Korea, and 8% from Germany

The high click-rate was in part due to sites like The Huffington Post inadvertently helping promote the malware campaign on the Internet by an embedded Twitter stream on its site.

More detail of Sean-Paul’s analysis can be found at the PandaLabs blog: http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/deep-dive-analysis-on-a-twitter-attack/