Twitter Mass Suspends Hacked Accounts

Twitter’s had a rough week. It was taken down by a DDoS attack last Thursday, hit by a resurgence of the Koobface virus, and also the target of repeated spam issues that exposed thousands of compromised accounts.

While Twitter continues to fight the DDoS attacks, they’re also taking action against spammers by suspending a wave of accounts believed to be infected by malware.

While Twitter is vague about the suspensions, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to figure out what’s going on. Here’s the Twitter status update:

We are suspending a number of accounts that have been affected by malware. We are sending instructions to the owners of these compromised accounts so that they may regain access. If you have been suspended, please check your mail for information on how to restore access.

We contacted Twitter several days ago over this very issue. We received this specific response to our inquiry about the compromised Twitter accounts:

“Unfortunately, it appears to be a number of groups working together; some phished accounts, a sprinkling of hacked accounts — but a large percentage of accounts affected appear to have a Koobface/Win32 variant. We’re attempting to identify the precise variants affecting these folks but have been pushing out notifications to those affected as is.”