In This Economy?

Today I did the unthinkable. I destroyed Twitter.

Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I definitely didn’t help the situation.

Here’s my story. Hopefully we can all learn from my mistakes and move forward into a new, Twitterpes-free tomorrow.

Right after lunch today I noticed I had an email…

…the email told me that I had a DM that said something along the lines of “ROFL, I just saw you in a video blah blah: LINK”. The DM was from someone I didn’t know, but it was a really common name (I don’t want to out them here becuase, like me, they didn’t mean any harm), so I thought it may be a friend from real life that was new to Twitter. It was my first big mistake to even consider looking at a DM from someone I didn’t immediately know.

But that was just the first big mistake.

The second and far more catastrophic (and idiotic) mistake came when I clicked on the link in the DM. I’m not going to lie. I wanted to see the video of myself. I think I’m pretty cool, and today that narcissism bit me in the ass. Hard.

My third and final big HUGE mistake came when I put entered my info on the seemingly normal looking Twitter login page that followed. The page was not a Twitter login page. Oh no. It was a hacked page made to look exactly like a Twitter login page. And I, in my excitement to see a video of myself (fucking narcissism!!!), entered my info and was dejected to see the Twitter fail whale.

A few minutes after that (seriously, maybe like 2-3 minutes) I started getting DMs from people telling me they got my message. Some of them were like, “oh crap, what is this video of me?” and other, more astute people immediately identified my symptoms and accurately diagnosed me as both infected and as an idiot.

I rushed my Twitter account into surgery and changed my password, but the damage had been done. In the 180 seconds between entering my info on the bogus Twitter screen and seeing people’s replies to me I had unknowingly sent more than 50 DMs to my friends telling them I had a video of them.

I tried to stop the bleeding by tweeting things like, “DO NOT CLICK MY DM LINKS”, but people check email before Twitter and they were falling victim in exactly the same way I was. I deleted all of my outgoing bogus DMs in a meager attempt to salvage the situation, but the damage was done.

I was just another foolish carrier of a Twitter phishing virus, or as I’m calling it — Twitterpes.

And unfortunately there isn’t enough Valtrex in the world to control these outbreaks.

–

Once again, for the hundreth time, I apologize if you caught Twitterpes from me. I’ll try to be more careful next time. And I’ll definitely never seek out another video of myself again. I now hate myself as a result of this.

Oh, and one more FYI: In the 3ish hours since my initial outbreak the phishing email has changed to the more ITE appropriate (and more obviously bogus): “Make $300-500 a week with my method, blah blah blah: LINK”.

Twitterers beware. Twitterpes is everywhere.

Tags: herpes, idiots, twitter, twitterpes, virus

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 3:49 PM and is filed under Human Encounters. 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.