Clever spammers circumvent Twitter safeguards

You can’t keep a good spammer down. That’s the unofficial motto of those who are using Twitter’s crackdown on Direct Message link spam.

When sending Twitter direct messages with links stopped working for some users earlier this week, speculation arose that it was a new feature intended to discourage DM spam. Twitter confirmed that it was actually a “technical issue” that the company was responding to by “restructuring back-end elements of (its) direct message system”, but that hasn’t stopped some spammers from finding a way around the bug.

Earlier today, we noticed DM spam from compromised accounts that first tweets a sketchy link from the account and then sends a message to that user’s followers with a link back to that tweet. A Twitter search for the phrase “I recommend to visit the link!” shows quite a bit of spammy activity going on.