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Symantec’s Sammy Chu reported in a forum post that the company has found a new version of a Twitter worm.
The worm spreads through fake Twitter invites that contain a malicious attachment called “Invitation Card.zip”, which contains the malware installer.
Once a victim clicks on the file, it installs on a user’s PC and “spreads by copying itself to removable drives and shared folders,” Chu wrote.
“As Twitter continues to gain popularity among social networking users, people are regularly receiving invitations and e-mail updates from fellow users. We expect that spammers will continue to use Twitter and other popular social networks as bait in their attacks,” Chu said.
The news comes as the importance of Twitter is growing, with one of its investors recently claiming the service will be bigger than Google.
But as its popularity grows, Twitter’s ecosystem is getting polluted as criminals are drawn to the traffic that they can cash in on, even if Twitter cannot.