Thousands of Twitter users were recently compromised by hackers using a Web 2.0 botnet. The hijacked accounts were later used to spread money-making spam campaigns. While it is not uncommon to see hackers targeting social networking sites, according to F-Secure’s blog, this particular attack could have something to do with some of the recent search engine deals that have been made.

Yahoo recently announced that they will begin to include Twitter's real-time feed into their search results and Facebook is now included in Google's search results. “The bad guys can use social networking trust to enhance their SEO attacks,” reads the blog.

F-secure recommends that users should be always careful when searching for hot topics as many of the results could lead to scamware. F-secure says that it expects to see fresh phishing attacks against Facebook ‘before too long.’
However, the very vector of propagation of the attacks is being used to mitigate these attacks.

If you check out the latest search results for "This you??" on Twitter, you’ll find that Twitter users are already spreading information to counter the dis-information pushed by the bad guys.

“It used to take weeks to stamp out e-mail hoaxes. Now, the issue almost corrects itself as quickly as it is abused,” the blog concludes.