Anyone following the malicious links on Twitter will receive an alert about malicious activities on their computer and the need to do a fast scan of their system files, said Nicolas Brulez of Kaspersky Lab.
The alerts read: “Windows Antivirus 2012 has found critical process activity on your PC and will perform fast scan of system files!”
"At the end of the 'scan', they are invited to install a fake Anti Malware solution. During our tests, several variants were pushed to the infected machines, which were the same threat using different names," he wrote in a blog post.
The fake or compromised Twitter accounts spammed up to eight messages a second, with links sending users to the infamous BlackHole exploit kit, said Brulez.
The security firm reported that 540 compromised Twitter accounts had sent out 4,148 tweets, linking to 44 unique domains, but Brulez said the numbers are likely to be higher as the campaign was on-going.
This story was first published by Computer Weekly