It was bound to happen.  The bad guys always have to ruin a good thing.  Of course email, forum and newsgroup Spam has been around for over a decade;  blog providers have had to stage a fight against comment Spam; SMS Spam is becoming more and more of a problem for the cell providers.  Well finally it has happend Spam has come to micro-blogging!

Rich Stiennon over at ThreatChaos.com published a blog post describing his research into Twitter Spam.

 In a nutshell he talks about the launch of a new application called TweetTornado.com.  It counts on the fact that most twitter users permit followers to join without permission.  TweetTornado automatically creates a large number of twitter ids, follows a large number of users, then sends unsolicited messages from a text file to those users.

This isn't a big problem yet, but you can bet it will get worse unless Twitter can find a way to stop it before it gets bad. But either way...If you haven't already it is probably time to consider screening who can follow you. To do that set your twitter account to "protect your updates".  This is done through the settings link, on the account tab,

-- Rick Wanner rwanner at isc dot sans dot org