Dangers Lurking In Twitterland
Malware is everywhere today, even in URLs posted to Twitter. This should come as no surprise really. Thanks to the immense popularity of the micro-blogging service, spammers and malware distributors have seized the opportunity to ply their trade. From Wired.com,
As many as one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs who have deployed a tool that examines URLs circulating in tweets.
According to the good folks at Kaspersky Labs, the situation is exasperated by Twitter's imposed character limit which has led to the widespread use of URL shortening services such as TinyURL making it difficult for users to determine the destination of links contained within tweets.
Kaspersky examines millions of tweets a day through the use of a tool they created called Krab Krawler. Krab Krawler works by expanding shortened URLs and comparing them to a database of known malicious sites. For unknown URLs, Kaspersky visits the webpage to determine if it is malicious or not.
About 26 percent of Twitter messages contain a URL, according to Costin Raiu, chief security expert at Kaspersky. About half of those appear to be generated by spammers or by people with malicious intent, he said. These URLs get spread quickly in re-tweets.
While this is a frightening statistic, common sense is still your best defence. Twitter is most fun when shared between people who know each other. In other words, don't click on URLs contained within tweets from people you don't know.
Len has been blogging for over 10 years and is a rabid WordPress fan. In addition to blogging here you can find him writing the occasional article and toiling away in the forums at WeblogToolsCollection.com. He also hangs out at the WordPress support forums lending a hand where he can. You can find his political scribblings at RiteTurnOnly.com
