A social network for sharing image collections has turned off sharing on Twitter after a large spam run referenced the service.
Spammy postings on Twitter contained the phrase “If I didn’t try this my life wouldn’t have changed” followed by a link. Many of the posting occurred on accounts of active Twitter users, and some posts included a tag referencing Weheartit.com, an image-sharing service.
On Wednesday, We Heart It wrote on Twitter that “we’ve temporarily disabled sign-in and sharing via Twitter while we look into an issue. Please sign-in via email in the meantime.”
We Heart It enabled sharing with Twitter in January. Items that people “heart” are autoposted to a person’s Twitter account.
Twitter appears to have swiftly dealt with the problem. Some of the links, which used the bit.ly URL shortener service, were being flagged as potentially malicious by both Twitter and Bit.ly.
The high number of posts on Twitter containing the links indicate that a large number of Twitter credentials may have been captured then abused by spammers, possibly by worm-like malware that gathered many accounts over a short time.
Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment.