The social networking website Twitter announced this weekend that it has detected a phishing scam on its website. A message on the website warns users to be suspicious about links that redirect them to websites looking similar to those on Twitter.com and request them to enter their log in credentials.

Co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, posted a message on its blog in which it admitted that there is a phishing swindle “directed at Twitter users” which consists of emails that are automatically sent to users’ inboxes and look very similar to personal notification messages. The emails contain texts as "hey! check out this funny blog about you?" and "Hey, i found a website with your pic on it? LOL check it out here."

The links provided in the email messages direct to a website, which is identical with Twitter’s and, moreover, has a similar URL, so it is not so easy to detect the fraud. These messages replicate themselves at a high rate though, as blogger Chris Pirillo stated that he had received two scam messages on Saturday only.

He added that users should always log on Twitter through the homepage only, as it is the most secure way to do it. However, many of them use 3^rd party services or other webpages to do this, so they will not be so mistrustful when they will have to enter their user name and password on the website provided by the fake email message.

Twitter announced that it would reset passwords of users that have been scammed, but it also recommends that all users should do the same in order to be sure that their information is not stolen and used to defraud others, too.