twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
One Track Mind
Throughout history, great men have amassed a huge following from doing good deeds, saying amazing things that get quoted until the end of time, and making their mark in the world. Followers carry their mission forward.
@matt6701 is not one of those great men. He’s working really hard on the followers part of the equation, but is missing the most important piece – a great message. Once all these people start following you, @matt6701, what do you have to say?
We’ll tell you what’s on his mind: stealing your credentials and taking over your twitter account. Firefox throws up a warning when clicking on each of those links:
This web site at addfollowers.net (and morefollowers.info, needfollowers.com, followadd.net) has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
Web forgeries are designed to trick you into revealing personal or financial information by imitating sources you may trust.
Entering any information on this web page may result in identity theft or other fraud.
(click on image for a larger view)
Why would anyone want to steal your twitter credentials? To spread a virus, perhaps. (Remember Mikeyy?) Maybe he just wants to spread false rumors, or make you look stupid. Or attempt to trick your friends into sending money to help you out. Only it’s not you. (Happens more often than you’d believe.)
Okay, so he’s targeting people who are amassing a huge following for the sole purpose of having a huge following. Maybe they weren’t popular in school, or are compensating for low self-esteem, or a physical inadequacy. Point and laugh if you like, or exploit them like we do, but some people need huge numbers to give their life meaning. And, without them, we wouldn’t have this post. So, thank you, clueless tweeps for providing us with content, once again.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
How It’s Made (aka: The Puppet Master)
How It’s Made is a show on the Discovery Channel that takes the viewer through the process of creating a diverse array of interesting things, such as flutes, bongos, mozzarella cheese, and marbles, from start to finish. We never saw an episode on puppets, which is why we were so fascinated when we discovered the making of a puppet on twitter.
Follow along, as we show you, step-by-step:
1. JoAnna Weaver-Grimes creates her account: JOJO1317
2. JoAnna sets her agenda: Politics and Religion
3. Imagine her disappointment as her posts go relatively unnoticed (no responses, no retweets, only 8 followers). Decides people would be more responsive to a 7-year-old, so she changes her username to VEG1317, and becomes Torye-Beth Grimes. (Both users have the same, exact posts through their entire stream, at the same time). In case you think we’re making this up, watch the transformation, here:
Are puppets innocent, sweet, trustworthy creatures? We say, “No.” Let’s be honest, if Punch was still around today, he’d be locked up for Domestic Violence, and we wouldn’t want Alf running around a houseful of kittens. The only puppets we really liked were Statler and Waldorf, who technically weren’t puppets, exactly, but that’s beside the point. The point is, we’re pretty wary of people who use their kids to fulfill their personal agendas, and if the kid is real, we feel bad for her. As one of our stand-by Fail Bird Handlers, @mindofchester, remarked:
Upon reading her twitter updates, you can see that it’s not her at all but her parents: “Thanks mom for helping type all of this! Parents r great and right all the time.”
Come on!! I mean, how douchey do you want your kid to look?!?
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Instantly Infamous
At 5:30 am, MDT, long before the rest of the world was in a tither about the StalkDaily worm, alert reader @agent_x sent us this DM:
By the time we rolled out of the nest, the account was already suspended. We were bummed to miss a blogging opportunity. As the day went on, though, it turned out to be The Big Story on twitter, and the rest of the world.
What happened:
- An attacker discovered they could insert a script into the Bio section on a twitter account.
- S/He created several twitter profiles with malicious code in the Bio, and then started following other tweeps.
- The people being followed then visited the page of their new follower to view their Bio.
- When they did so, their twitter cookie was accessed, along with their username.
- This allowed the attacker to take control of the victim’s twitter account to send tweets.
- It also added itself to the victim’s Bio, making that twitter account another host of the malicious script.
They also posted this tweet to the victim’s stream:
StalkDaily.com claims they’re not the bad guy. Here’s the denial they posted on their website this afternoon:
(We reserve the right to review StalkDaily.com later. This post is just about the worm.)
18 hours later, twitter is still working on the problem, and assures tweeps that no sensitive data was compromised. Even with all the publicity, people continue to spread the StalkDaily word, which is especially ironic for this unfortunate tweep:
What does this mean for twitter? They’ve hit the Big Time. They are now Somebody Important Enough To Attack. It means they need to review all the code they use, and plug all the possible holes before the next time, because there will be a next time.
Since nobody lost data, their computers didn’t crash, their identity wasn’t stolen, and their credit cards are still maxed out, life goes on. We’re thankful for @Lhasapso, who gave us the perfect punch line:
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
OMG!
(Yes, this is the post that will condemn our souls to hell. If you don’t get the obscure religious references, perhaps you’ll be saved from such a fate.)
Twitter is big news. Everywhere you turn, someone is using twitter, reporting on the popularity of twitter, or asking you to connect with them on twitter. It seems as if God and everyone is on twitter.
That last statement was theoretical, until we got the following message in our gmail account:
Imagine our thrill at being one of the chosen!
It turns out that Jesus Christ has a bunch of twitter accounts.
Imagine how easy Jesus’s job would have been, if he could have tweeted his sermons. It would have saved him from climbing that mountain to talk to the masses. A few clicks on the keyboard, and he could have spent a lot more time making wine.
And, how easy would it have been to share his word? His prophets wouldn’t have to travel from city to city to retell his story. Just a quick RT, and the message is repeated.
Unfortunately, it looks as if the Son of God has added at least one nefarious character to his flock in order to attract new followers. We have no stones to throw, so we’ll just have to block him.
We did learn something interesting, in our research. “Jesus Christ loves all Marketing, SEO, Web Programming, conservative”
So, WWJD? Evidently, use social media to grow his downline.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
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