Normally I go about my business and don't pay a lot of attention to talk of Twitter spam and hacks. Until it happened to me.
I was active on Twitter and had been noticing a number of dms and @ messages asking me to take an IQ quiz. There is an awful lot of quizzes and games out there. You can send followers this and that. Generally, I don't pay much attention--I have too much else to do.
But I did receive a tweet from a business acquaintance asking me to view a video. She is far from frivolous and I took it as a serious request.
This is when things became interesting.
I have four different Twitter accounts focused on separate purposes (yes, unlike Facebook, you can have multiple Twitter accounts). So when I check for Twitter updates, I quickly go from one, sign out, then go to the next.
When I tried to sign back into the account in which I had clicked, I couldn't log in. Then I saw I was being redirected to a different URL. When I manually typed in the proper URL I got in. So far so good.
Later on, I found I was unable to access @ messages and direct messages. Meanwhile I got some email notifications of direct messages from two followers (I have my Twitter accounts set so I get notified of dms). They were telling me that my account was sending them spam messages inviting them to click on a link to take this ubiquitous IQ test.
I tried to answer them, but by that time, I could no longer tweet out.
At that point I started to feel pretty hopeless. I had put a lot of effort in to building up my followers, especially in my main account and certainly didn't want to start all over again.
After searching on Twitter's support site, I was taken to a page listing step-by-step actions you can take such as signing out of your Twitter account, emptying your cache, and changing your password to one you don't use elsewhere. The page wasn't easy to find so I listed it here. The actual URL is http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/31796
I also ran an antivirus scan and walked away from the computer for a couple hours. When I returned, Twitter was working fine. But now I have to change passwords to all of the apps linked to my Twitter account.
And that was another headache.
Sigh...
