Facebook Poses Biggest Security Risk, Sophos Finds

“Many tweets today come with URLs and not just clear text URLs, but short URLs,” he said. “Really few followers check first what’s behind each link, they trust the content and they click any link in a tweet. This is a perfect opportunity for the criminals to infect more people, doing it fast and without any suspicion.”

The more followers a person has, the more potential victims there are, he added.

“If it’s a Trojan.Banker or Trojan.PSW or Trojan.Spy family, any and all money-related passwords may be stolen and of course, it becomes money for the criminals,” he said. “Of course, if they can now steal another Twitter account they can infect more and more people. In other words, it’s a kind of pyramid- they would infect followers of an infected follower of the initial Twitter accounts.”