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According to Twitter’s analytics team, tweets have grown to 50 million daily versus five thousand daily in 2007. Even a small fraction of users who fall for these attacks can prove to be lucrative for the criminals.

Hackers have exploited this in the past and over the last few days reports of a renewed spam have been reported. Twitter members were receiving messages such as “LOL. This is me??” or “LOL. This you??” On clicking these phrases users were linked to China-based Twitter log-in pages.

Those who provided their log-in information had their private information harvested for later misuse by these cybercriminals. This, a classic case of phishing scam, was a serious enough attack that prompted Twitter to issue a warning about it on their website.