(CNBC) — Getting a company's attention over Twitter is becoming an easy and often effective way for consumers to achieve what they want, when they want. Yet the increase in hackers creating fake accounts to interact with consumers — and "phish" for private information — is a growing concern.
It goes something like this: Someone tweets at a company because they may be upset about an issue. A fake account on Twitter replies directly to that person, and asks them to log in to a fake website. The victim then exposes their personal information to hackers.
A 2014 report by EMC noted that various phishing scams cost companies a combined $5.9 billion in nearly 500,000 separate attacks. Meanwhile, cybersecurity experts at Kapersky Lab found that last year, more than a quarter of phishing scams targeted users' financial data.
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