Isn’t Easter supposed to be the time of getting dressed up nicely, maybe going to a church with your family, eating too much ham, eggs and rolls and finding bright colored eggs hidden all over the yard?  I’m fairly sure the last thing it’s supposed to be about is the spreading of a new worm that is aimed directly at and infects Twitter accounts.  Have we officially entered into a new era of virus attacks?  Are social networking sites next?

If that is indeed the case, and new worms are being developed that target social networking, things could get extremely ugly, extremely fast.  This most recent worm that spread over this Easter weekend throughout Twitter and is bringing up a great deal of questions about the safety of this type of networking and ways to avoid it in the future.

According to reports:

“The attack began around 2 a.m. Saturday from four accounts. Twitter’s security team hunted the malicious code and secured compromised accounts throughout the day. Nearly two hundred user accounts were compromised by the worm on Saturday…Another wave of attacks hit on Sunday, but the blog didn’t say how many additional accounts were hit. The company says it removed nearly 10,000 tweets that could have been used to spread the worm.”

Yikes.  As you know, both Facebook and MySpace have also been used, in the past to spread some nasty code and viruses, but Twitter is a different beast.  If someone is figuring out ways to spread malicious code just by using Tweets, that opens the door for a huge number of different devices vulnerable for infection.  From laptops to desktops, cell phones to email, a lot can go wrong.  Keep your eye on this one, you haven’t heard the end of it.