Acai Berry Spam Attack Spreads On Twitter: How To Avoid It

Wondering why everyone in your Twitter feed is suddenly so excited about the weight they lost thanks to Acai berries?

The spammy Acai tweets--which read something along the lines of "Everyone should try acai! I lost 10lbs!!"--may be related to the hack that cracked Gawker's user database, compromising users' password information, among other data.

Twitter's Del Harvey, who heads the company's trust and safety team, advised users in a tweet, "Got a Gawker acct that shares a PW w/your Twitter acct? Change your Twitter PW. A current attack appears to be due to the Gawker compromise." Twitter's official Trust and Safety account (@Safety) followed up with more information, "In other words: the 'acai berry' spam attack looks to be connected w/ the Gawker hack rather than a worm."

The best way to ensure your Twitter account does not get hijacked by acai berry tweets is to change your Twitter password, which you can do by logging into Twitter, then going to "Settings" at the top right of Twitter.com. Don't forget you'll also have to update any third party Twitter clients, like TweetDeck, with the new password.