You’re probably aware of the term, I certainly hope you are. Phishers intend to steal your identity, usually by way of social engineering. They often try this with emails pretending to be from your bank for example, and directing you to a fake site using a similar URL to the genuine website, which asks for your internet banking login detals.
Lately the phishers have been targeting users of Facebook and more recently Twitter. You can read about the Facebook scams on the Facebook blog here.
Twitter users are hit with a vanity promise. The sole purpose of many Twitter users is to get as many followers as possible, so getting a tweet along he lines of “OMG I just got over 1000 followers today from http://twittercut.com.” would be irresistible.
The website in that link asks for your Twitter credentials. Do that and you will probably lose access to your Twitter account as the Phishers will change your login details.
You might ask why these scammers want your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Well apart from using them to further spread their Phishing attempts across those networks using your accounts, who knows what personal information they can get about you from your settings that wouldn’t otherwise be visible. Facebook holds a lot of personal information if you give it to them. It’s not too late to delete or change some of that. According to my Facebook profile for example, I’m almost 100 years old, not quite true, and I don’t live anywhere near where they think I do. You really don’t have to be too truthful with your profile, and that applies to much of the Social Web.
Be careful what you tell the world about yourself, and be careful what you click on.