After the last few weeks of Garda letters, accusations of perjury, ex journalists jumping ship and in-house ructions amongst various political parties, most members of the Dáil benefitted today from their almost universal ignorance of Twitter as any of them with an account could have fallen victim to the type of phishing attack that struck the UK energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

Don’t make him angry… Ed Miliband actually handled the phishing attack in good spirits.

His 6,664 followers awoke this morning to get a DM from Miliband with the rather forefront message, of “Hey, i’ve been having better sex and longer with this here”. What they made of the link to a herbal Viagra site that accompanied the message is not known but good egg that Miliband is he followed up the message with a tweet saying  ”Oh dear it seems like I’ve fallen victim to twitter’s latest ‘phishing’ scam.”

Apparently though Miliband is not the only MP to be hacked in the spate. The Press Association is reporting that deputy Labour leader, Harriet Harman admitted to MPs that a tweet was sent from her account to a ‘surprised’ shadow prisons minister Alan Duncan. She stated that she “wouldn’t ever send a tweet like that”. Unfortunately the contents of the tweet weren’t reproduced.

Twitter posted a message to its Twitter Safety channel late Thursday warning users to beware of direct messages. “If you get a DM from an enthusiastic lady wanting to converse by IM, please ignore. User is likely compromised & request is spam.”

Security experts believe that the messages are related to the fake ‘This you?’ tweet sent out earlier this week. In this scam respondents were led to a false Twitter log-in page. Once they filled in their details spammers were able to have access to the accounts, sending out more false links to followers.

TechEye reports that other victims include the head of audio at The Guardian newspaper, whose account told followers that he was “24, female and horny” and the country’s Press Complaints Commission was also hit. Even Twitter’s oldest  user, 104-year-old Ivy Bean, fell victim to the scam.