iPhone Twitter app links redirecting to questionable sites

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iPhone Twitter app links redirecting to questionable sites

I hope someone knowledgeable can help me. The problem is this: Any link on my twitterfeed, when clicked from within the iPhone Twitter App, is redirecting to p**n sites via 4-5 redirection steps starting with something called gearse dot com. This is happening with ANY link on the timelines of any user I follow, including news sites, technology sites and so forth.

If I open Twitter via twitter dot com on a browser (iOS Safari or Chrome), this problem is not occurring, and I can open links just as usual. But the same links, when tapped (to click) within the Twitter app, redirects to these questionable sites. I have absolutely no clue how this happened. It is possibly the work of some malware, but I thought malwares didn't run on iOS, and I don't use my phone ever to visit any questionable sites.

So far, I have uninstalled and re-installed the Twitter App, to no avail. From the website, I revoked the access of iOS apps, which forced me to relogin to Twitter in order to use it, but that didn't help either.

Can someone please suggest what I can do in this situation? I know one option is to reset to factory settings and then reload everything from the most recent backup, but I want to avoid that extreme step if I can avoid it. Please help if you can!

Thanks.

iPhone 5s, iOS 7.0.2

Posted on Aug 13, 2014 6:07 AM

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Answer 1

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suirauqa Author

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72 points

Aug 13, 2014 7:13 AM in response to suirauqa

🙂

Thanks to an old answer by user roshnaidg in a different forum, my question is resolved.
This is what roshnaidg wrote:

Okay so I was facing the exact same issue. I am in India and using the twitter for iPhone app and whenever I clicked a link in the app, it would keep redirecting me to linkbucks.

Do the following:-

1) Go to your wifi settings, and click on the wifi you are using. (there should be an 'i' button there)

2) Now under this section called "IP address you will see three subsections called DHCP, BOOTP and Static.

Click on the option DNS under any of these three.

3) There should be 8.8.8.8 number written. DO NOT REMOVE THAT. If you see another number written there (and you should see some number maybe starting with 64 etc which is the linkbucks redirect), delete that number from there.

Voila! This solved the annoying twitter redirect. Now I can open all links on twitter for iphone without linkbucks showing up.

Let me know if this helps you.

I found that simply removing the offending DNS was not good enough. I had to manually add the other Google DNS 8.8.4.4 to the DNS list for that connection, et voilà! My annoying problem was resolved, too! Now more p**n sites showing up when I click any link from within the Twitter app on my iPhone.

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