UPDATED: Duncan Bannatyne hit by Twitter phishing attack

Not even the millionaire dragons can escape the clutches of the evil tweeting spammers it appears. Searching for my regular dose of gossip from the den I clicked on @DuncanBannatyne yesterday and low and behold his account has been suspended due to "strange activity".

Now what kind of strange activity can Mr Bannatyne have been up to? Surely he'd find the whole situation [insert Scottish accent] "ridiculous!" One of his new investments had the answer.

In a conversation on Twitter, Sharon Wright, founder of MagnaMole and an entrepreneur who Bannatyne and James Caan recently backed on Dragons' Den, revealed her new colleague has been the victim of a phishing attack.

 

The downtime of Duncan's account is reflective of Twitter's latest move to rid the site which while increasing in popularity is also facing ever more spam and, more dangerously, phishing attacks. The team behind Twitter revealed in their blog on Monday that accounts affected by malware have been suspended. Owners of those accounts have been sent instructions on how to regain access.

In the old days when such attacks occured Twitter used to advise users to simply reset their passwords but the fact that accounts are now being suspensed shows just how much of a problem the comprising of users' details is becoming. Add to that the recent denial of service attack and it is clear that Twitter has a lot of work to do to ramp up its defences.

Update (14/08/09): As of this afternoon, Duncan is back on Twitter!

It took a good while though which suggests Twitter had a lot of affected accounts to work through.