Recently there have been a large number of tweets from scammers that indicate that if you click on the link contained in the tweet you will see a photograph of yourself.  Unfortunately, if you click on the tweet, you don’t get a photograph of yourself, but you do download a Blackhole Exploit Kit that can do any number of malicious things to you and your computer.  It has key stroke logging capabilities so it can read the information on your computer and get access to your credit card numbers and other personal information that may be on your computer.  It also can take over your computer and turn it into a zombie computer as part of a botnet by which the scammers use your computer to send out their scam emails.

TIPS

Never click on a link unless you are positive it is from a reliable source.  Even if it appears to be from one of your friends, their account may have been hacked into and the link may have been sent by a scammer.  Always call your friend first to confirm that the message was from him or her and even then you should exercise caution because he or she may be passing on malware that he or she is not aware he or she has downloaded.  In this particular scam, many of the scamming tweets are coming from Cuba or Russia so if the link ends in “.ru” or “.cu” you should be particularly wary.