Gawker hack leads to Twitter acai spam

It's bad enough that a database of 1.3 million user passwords from Gawker Media sites was hacked and posted online over the weekend, but it gets worse. It turns out that many of those users didn't set unique passwords for all their online accounts. Now, a large number of Twitter accounts have been compromised and used to spam bogus links about acai berries.

The acai spam attack was so large that Twitter users reported it to Twitter security as a worm. In fact, it doesn't seem to be spreading through malicious links. It's just that the number of accounts stolen via the leaked Gawker database is that huge. Twitter itself has confirmed that the Gawker attack and the Twitter spam are related. At this point, the original spam seems to have died down and been replaced with a new and unintentional kind of spam: people warning their friends not to click on acai berry links. Doh!

If you've ever had a Gawker account, now's a good time to change all your passwords. We've already posted about a few apps that will make it easier.

Tags: acai, gawker, hacked, passwords, security, spam, twitter