Lady Gaga and her ‘monsters’ fall for dumb Twitter spam attack

You’d think a woman who’s savvy enough to re-invent herself from a downtown New York piano lounge singer into one of the biggest pop stars in the world would be savvy enough to know not to click on links spambots @ reply her with on Twitter, but apparently not. Nor are many of her devoted followers, it appears.

Reports Mashable:

Beware of any messages and links advertising a so-called “banned” Lady Gaga video spreading across Twitter. The messages are part of a rogue application attack that has quickly spread across the network in the past 24 hours, tricking thousands — if not millions — of users, including Lady Gaga herself.

The vector for the attack is similar to methods frequently used on Facebook. Users follow a link purportedly to a shocking video and upon clicking the “play” button are asked to give an application access to their account. Upon doing this, the rogue application then sends spam messages with the false video link to all of the user’s friends or followers.

In the case of this particular attack, the text of the tweets most frequently contains some variation of: VIDEO PROHIBIDO LADY GAGA banned [LINK] @shakira @ladygaga como ganar dinero facil

Clicking on the link takes the user to a fake YouTube page, where clicking the play button asks the user to approve a Twitter application.

So the next time someone you don’t know tweets some jibberish at you with a link attached and you wonder, “Who falls for these dumb hacker tricks?” — now you know: Lady Gaga and her fans.