Since the death of the most wanted criminal, terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, there have been several scams and phishing attacks spreading on Facebook and Twitter, which claimed to show a leaked death videoof the terrorist.

For a while, scams and phishing attacks related to Osama Bin Laden had stopped, but now phishers are once again on the look for naive Twitter users, promising and tricking them to show leaked pictures of Osama Bin Laden.

Users on Twitter are tweeting (RT) a message that states – “Pics of Osama Bin Laden Are Finally Released! [LINK] ::wanring very gorry::”. The same message is spreading with simplified content – “Pictures of Osama Bin Laden [LINK] that leads to a page”

Clicking on the short URL will lead to a site which is a clone of Twitter home page. You are asked to login to Twitter by providing your username and password. Before you enter your login details, take a look at the URL in your browser’s address bar. You can see that it’s a fake URL and it is simply an attack to steal your login details.

If you enter your login credentials and click on Sign in button, your account details, including the password will be sent to the phisher via email. The phisher will then have complete control over your Twitter account, who can use your Twitter account by further spreading the scam message to your followers by tweeting and sending them private messages.

If you happen to use the same password in multiple places like Facebook and Gmail, it is likely that your other accounts might be compromised as well. This way, the phisher can steal more information for financial gain.

I suggest you to avoid clicking on the link and alert your followers about the attack. If you have mistakenly clicked on the link and entered your login details, then change the password of your Twitter and all other accounts immediately. Also, contact your followers to stop re-tweeting the message and ask them to change their account password as well.

Twitter has been a victim of  several  scams  in the  past, most of which were sent through direct messages (DM), however, the DM scams have come down considerably after Twitter employed a brilliant spam protection for DM messages. However, it looks like spammers have begun using the plain old email scams to trick users again.

Please feel free to retweet this post so that your friends and followers will be aware about the issue.