Back in 2009 I warned computer security experts lack focus on Twitter. Time for an update.

Last night, Graham Cluley (Sophos) filed a tweet regarding yet another Facebook scam. This morning he re-tweeted it — and not by accident. You see, Twitter doesn’t give you an option to “RT” your own tweets. Cluley pulled the trigger twice because he didn’t want his message to get lost in the din of tweets other people sent out during his subscribers’ overnight slumber.

In other words, Cluley wanted his tweet to be “king of the hill” when you logged into Twitter this morning.

Some day, security experts will need to “get the word out” pronto. But there might just be too many self-RTs for us to get the info we need…

What, pray tell, would merit a “self-RT”? Well, uh, Cluley wants you to read his latest blog entry. He offers an RSS feed for his blog entries, but it’s not good enough — every one of his blog entries needs a tweet. And a Digg. And a Facebook status update. And now this blog entry needs two tweets.

To his credit, Cluley put “RT from last night:” at the front of his re-tweet. At least we know it’s a duplicate. Contrast him with @PCVirusNews, whose tweets ironically look like they come from a spam botnet. Indeed, as I write this, their penultimate tweet is a four-peat posted on August 23,26,27,29. Heck, it’s a five-peat if you count the very latest tweet, which just highlights another site’s reprint of the same column highlighted in those four earlier tweets.

“Ha ha! I’m king of the hill on Twitter! My third self-RT is at the top of every subscriber’s page! Wait, what’s this? Graham Cluley just did a self-RT. Well, I’ll show him! Take that, Mr. Cluless! My fourth self-RT is at the top of every subscriber’s page! Ha ha!”

At the risk of repeating myself from a previous column— ha! “Repeat myself,” get it? Seriously, though, any number of computer security experts have slapped me over the years for repeating myself from one column to the next. For sounding like a broken record. For being repetitious with previously written content. For saying the same thing over and over and over again, from one column to the next. For repeating myself each time I post. For sounding like a scratched CD. For expounding on the same points in previously written content…

Look, when you bang out columns as long as I have, you begin to realize “everything old is new again.” You find yourself launching every new column with phrases like “Back in 2009 I warned…”

But when you repeat a tweet a few hours later because someone might have slept through your original announcement? Puh-lease.

Here’s the brewing problem, folks. Some day, a virus or worm or whatever will strike the globe with amazing speed & agility. The experts will need to “get the word out” pronto. But there might just be too many self-RTs for us to get the information we truly need.

Manager:

What’s the latest news on the global cybertastrophe?

Employee:

I don’t know. All the experts on Twitter keep repeating their tweets because they want to be the top news item…

Memo to @PCVirusNews: in the movie Once Is Not Enough, Linda says “ ’You have ten fingers like a mouth and a mouth like ten fingers!’ Now, you couldn’t ask for a better reference than that, could you?” Tweet that ten times to your Twitter subscribers.

:repeatdaily
TWEET.EXE “@PCVirusNews Reminder: please read http://Vmyths.com/2010/08/30/twitter-3″
ping /n 86400 127.0.0.1
goto :repeatdaily

Intelligence officials use the term “stovepipe” to describe “several ways in which raw [computer security] intelligence information may be presented without proper context… The lack of context may come from a particular group, in the [computer security] structure, selectively presenting only that information that supports certain conclusions.”

Multiple employees spout their personal opinions on McAfee’s official Twitter account. How long will this lack of corporate discipline continue?

In short, a “stovepipe” problem can lead to mass hysteria. And I’ve got a sneaking suspicion Twitter will help foment hysteria when the next media-darling worm or virus comes along.

On the corporate side, the context of any tweet about the latest worm will quickly get lost in the din of tweets about booth bunnies, white papers, and the occasional vetting failure.

“What’s a vetting failure, Rob?” It occurs when a company doesn’t limit / review official communications before release. For example, multiple non-PR employees use McAfee’s Twitter account to broadcast their own personal opinions. Their lack of discipline is a vetting failure in the making as we can see in this example from 27 Apr 09:

McAfeeAvertLabs: Hi! If you think I add value to your network, do drop me a recommendation at http://mrtweet.com/McAfeeAv… Much appreciated!

McAfeeAvertLabs: we just started following @MrTweet…. might take a few days! my bad!

Then, of course, McAfee tweets commercial advertisements (aka “spam”). This fact raises two philosophical questions. First: does a mature firm in the computer security industry need to advertise to offset the cost of a free service like Twitter? Second: why do some reporters feel compelled to subscribe to computer security spam?

It’s only a matter of time before we learn McAfee’s offi­cial stand on abor­tion & gun control…

On the personal side, the computer security experts themselves seem far too wrapped up in their own celebrity status. The context of any tweet on the latest worm will get lost in the din of tweets about their speaking engagements and the bad airline food they endured. Check out these actual tweets from computer security experts:

• Mark Sunner (MessageLabs): “if you loved the lion the witch and the wardrobe et al then you will find this book mesmerizingly insightful http://www.planetnarnia.com/”
• Costin Raiu (Kaspersky Labs): “Tried a Segway for the first time, with the very nice chaps from segwaybooking.com.”
• Graham Cluley (Sophos): “can’t believe i missed watching Dr Who live again.. what kind of fan am i anyway? thank goodness for the pvr…”
• Mary Landesman (antivirus.about.com): “Time Warner: yeah, our service sucks, but we’re a monopoly so we’ll just charge more and give less. Congressman fights back. http://tiny …”
• Mikko Hypponen (F-Secure): “Hey, since when has Twitter automatically converted ‘normal’ links to Tinyurls? My previous tweet should have pointed to f-secure.com…”
• Costin Raiu (Kaspersky Labs): “20 people at the Shuntaint presentation, where is everybody else?”

Yes yes yes, I’ll grant you the fact these experts opened their own personal Twitter accounts. Yes yes yes, I’ll grant you the fact they can say just about anything they want. But it doesn’t change the fact their tweets lack focus.

McAfee uses Twitter for spam to help pay for all those free tweets they send out. Their own web­site just can’t sup­port their PR needs…

To put it simply: computer security tweets lack focus at both the personal and corporate levels. And that’s bad news for us. Undisciplined experts can easily generate hysteria with a “speak first, thinkignore later” tweetitude.

On the bright side, reporters might soon get tired of all these unfocused tweets … and stop following the potential hypemongers.

Take computer security reporter John Leyden, for example — his Twitter account follows McAfee Avert Labs and MessageLabs bigwig Mark Sunner and Sophos bigwig Graham Cluley. Do you honestly think Leyden cares about McAfee’s official stand on abortion or Sunner’s latest book review for Home Schooling magazine or Cluley’s inability to time-shift a TV time traveler?

It’s only a matter of time before Leyden himself realizes he doesn’t care about these unfocused tweets … and stops following the potential hypemongers. Let’s just hope he stops following them for the right reasons.

(I suspect he will, given the fact he follows the Vmyths Twitter account…)

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Vmyths suffered a similar problem in the early 2000s when I expanded this website both to critique the antivirus industry in general and to serve as an outlet for my computer security humor.

Tabloid repor­ters may follow a com­pu­ter secu­rity expert’s unfocused blogs & tweets.

Re­spec­table jour­nalists must stop the practice.

I finally launched SecurityCritics and HumorControl so Vmyths could return to its paladin roots.

But hey, let’s not overlook the fact I myself lack focus in my totally personal blog. I opine on everything from computer security to local gas price gouging to the amazing poker hands I’ve been dealt to a newly minted word to describe Wikipedia.

The key here is that I don’t view my personal blog as something that will change the world and I don’t see myself as wrapped up in my own celebrity status. (Well, except maybe here I do, but that’s it.)

I try to change the world through my focused efforts at Vmyths, SecurityCritics, and (yes!) HumorControl. If you subscribe to my personal blog, I urge you to review all of your blog/tweet subscriptions to see which ones lack focus. If any other computer security experts out there claim they don’t use Twitter to change the world, then be sure to cancel your subscriptions to their tweets as well.

Remember those hysterical chain-letter emails? Now imagine hysterical chain-letter tweets … from the experts themselves.

If, on the other hand, you subscribe to my personal blog because you’re that totally amazing lover who gently cradled me in her arms during that horrific time of grief after my wife died … yes honey, you follow my blog for all the right reasons and I can’t thank you enough for our wonderful midwestern tryst and I could sure use another digital snapshot of you as the previous one got, uh, “messed up” along with my keyboar—

—ahh, but you’ll notice I lack focus in the previous paragraph. {ahem} Let’s not digress. (And let’s not tell anyone about my keyboard spills, okay? Thanks, I appreciate it.)

Let’s hope the rest of the computer security industry realizes their lack of focus on Twitter … before they plunge into an intelligence stovepipe when the next media-darling worm or virus comes along.

Reporter Brian Krebs, writing in his Washington Post blog, revealed details of a worldwide fake-antivirus scam that defrauded credit card holders out of tens of millions of dollars. In a follow-up, Krebs reported the embarrassing media exposure led Visa & MasterCard to give up their unwitting involvement in the scam.

Okay, I’ll bite. Why didn’t the anti­virus industry offer a bounty to catch the crimi­nals behind this huge anti­virus scam?

Various news outlets have regurgitated the story and at least one antivirus vendor gave it some spin in their corporate blog. But one key issue left untounched … is why fake-AV scams grew so obscenely successful.

To me, the answer is simple. Two decades of hysteria convinced everyone to take it on blind faith that antivirus software is the fo shizzle answer to our online woes.

It’s no wonder that computer users will blindly trust an antivirus product that pops up on their screen saying “alert, alert, your PC is infected!” A fake-AV scam will demand $x9.95 to clean up the viruses it finds — which is exactly the same amount a legit antivirus firm will charge if you want their product to do exactly the same thing.

Society’s addiction to inferior antivirus software is now so embedded into our computing norms — the battle cry “get yourself some antivirus software” has become so mantra — that all of society sternly refuses to question its validity.

This scam’s obscene success stems from anti­virus experts who screamed bloody murder for the last two decades … and com­pu­ter repor­ters who gladly quoted all the hype.

Fake-AV scammers aggressively demand you pay for their antivirus software. And the entire computer security industrial complex aggressively demands you buy & use antivirus software. So when it comes to fake-AV scams, the computer security industrial complex isn’t part of the solution—

—it’s actually part of the problem.

And it’s been part of the problem for fully two decades. You can thank the hype-meisters for the obscene success rate for fake-AV scams.

Okay, now here’s some food for thought. You may recall Microsoft offers six-figure rewards for information leading to the arrest & conviction of certain virus writers. Why didn’t the antivirus industry pony up a reward to shutter this huge antivirus scam?

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You’ll notice I call it a “fake-antivirus scam” when everyone else on the planet calls it “rogue antivirus software.” Now, I’ll admit definition #4 for “rogue” tackles this very subject—

—yet definition #1 sums up any number of legit employees & companies in the antivirus industry. I insist “rogue” is the wrong word … and I’ll bet you this expert agrees with me.

My original notion for this column centered on the media hysteria I expected from F-Secure’s huffing over variants of the Downadup worm. Quoting from a (level-headed) story in The Register:

[The Downadup worm] that attacks a patched vulnerability in Microsoft Windows, is making exponential gains if estimates from researchers at F-Secure are accurate. They show 6.5 million new infections in the past four days, bringing the total number of machines it has compromised to almost 9 million. The astronomical growth stunned some researchers, although others cautioned the numbers could be inflated since the counting of infected computers is by no means an exact science. Most agreed F-Secure’s estimate was certainly plausible and if it proved to be correct, represented a major development in the world of cyberthreats.

6.5 million newly infected PCs, you say? All of them whacked in a four-day period? Hmmm. The timing of this makes me wonder how many of those PCs showed up under the plastic tannenbaum.

Yet it would seem my worries about hysteria have died on the vine. Consider the following:

The media yawned when F-Secure claimed the Downadup worm tallied another 6.5 million PCs in a four-day period…

• The SANS Internet Storm Center continued to display a “green” Internet threat level;
• Symantec continued to hold at “ThreatCon 2” with no mention of the Downadup worm;
• McAfee didn’t even mention it in a “breaking advisory”;
• ISS maintained an “AlertCon 1” with no mention of the Downadup worm;
• Sophos technovangelist Graham Cluley raised little more than an eyebrow in his corporate blog; and
• About.com antivirus guide Mary Landesman devoted only two paragraphs in her blog.

Only Kaspersky Labs seems to have given F-Secure some shrift when they announced a virus alert on their website. Yet they only identified it as a moderate risk. So, uh … let’s call it “short shrift” and leave it at that.

The media, too, seems to have collectively yawned over F-Secure’s declaration. One CNN Headline News anchor — dare I say it? — almost smirked while reading from the teleprompter. (In all fairness, it isn’t the first time a CNN mannequin has smirked or spoken in an upbeat tone about a devastating computer virus attack.)

This non-media circus reminds me yet again of Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf. F-Secure, on the other hand, will doubtless call up the Cassandra fable to dismiss any accusations of wolf-crying.

One quote in The Register‘s story leapt out at me for its irony:

“This thing has gotten way out of hand,” said Paul Ferguson, a security researcher for anti-virus provider Trend Micro who has spent the past several weeks tracking the worm’s progress. “It seems pretty spectacular to me that there could be that much growth.”

I dismiss Ferguson’s quote as ironic because Trend Micro’s “vinfo” page hasn’t declared a medium- or high-risk alert. How can we take him at face value when his company doesn’t even wail about it on an alert page?

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Antivirus vendors and computer news reporters have certainly suffered a drought of hysteria in the past few years — and I myself fret that we’re due for another hystericane.

F-Secure will doubtless call up the Cassandra fable to dismiss any accusations of wolf-crying…

Why, then, hasn’t the Downadup worm generated “the perfect storm” of media hysteria?

The answer may lie in an amazing buildup to America’s “double major holiday.” Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day while today sees the inauguration of Barack Obama. News organizations appear highly focused on the orgasm of festivities in Washington, DC—

—and the media’s infatuation with U.S. politics may have simply overshadowed everything else of importance.

“You sound a bit facetious, Rob.” Yeah, okay: you caught me. Longtime readers will recall the fact government experts reminisce about the Nimda worm as a global catastrophe that cost billions of dollars and that would have qualified as one of the worst acts of cyber-terrorism ever caught on tape. And those experts still bemoan the fact it didn’t get much airplay … because it came just one week after the equally devastating physical terrorism of 9/11/01.

First Nimda; now Downadup. This leads me to ask a philosophical question. “Why do the world’s most devastating computer security attacks always seem to take place when reporters are too preoccupied to give it the attention it truly deserves?”