• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 20, 2009

David Szetela's social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook began posting messages filled with spam this past weekend. The CEO and founder of PPC ad agency Clix Marketing says the spam messages were sent to his friends on Facebook and more than 25,000 Twitter followers.

The news came on Saturday while he was traveling to Chicago. Szetela got a Twitter message from a friend warning that his Facebook account may have been hacked. He checked on Twitter and could see that a message had been posted on his account with an advertisement for a SAT/LSAT exam prep service.

Later that night, he checked Ping.fm, and saw that an even longer message had been posted there. It appears the messages were sent through Ping.fm, a message aggregator that lets members post messages distributed to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and more.

On Monday morning, another friend alerted him that it had happened again. So he changed his Ping.fm password -- so far so good. But Sean McCullough, founder and CEO at Ping.fm, says it's not a hacker -- and that Szetela has an email virus he needs to eliminate.

McCullough had a similar situation arise several months ago with NBC Journalist Ann Curry. In Curry's case, McCullough says, an email client distributed the virus through the Ping.fm account.

Sent through an email client, the messages posted without being filtered on any of the more than 40 social network sites that Ping.fm supports for the "hundreds of thousands of customers." McCullough suggests that Szetela reset the email address attached to the Ping.fm account and scan the client for viruses.

But Szetela says it's really unlikely to be spam -- rather, a hacker doing mischief, because "it happened only twice. Both times through Ping, and hasn't happened since I changed my Ping password."

In the past year, security experts have seen an increase in the frequency of hackings and spam campaign attacks. The spam attacks are not intended to divulge confidential information, such as last week's attack on Twitter, where TechCrunch received 310 confidential Twitter documents in a ZIP file from the Hacker Croll hackers. These are intended more to distribute spam. The culprits may have found the perfect tool -- social media aggregators.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has been writing for more than a year about the fight against spam as an ongoing battle. Facebook often offers news about its walled garden, too. Now that social media sites have put in place more stringent methods to prevent spam from being posted directly, it appears that spammers have found a new way through the back door.