Oct
31
2009
Twitter Becoming a Malware Source
Wired Threat Level ran a piece this week about how malware is becoming a growing threat in the URL’s that get posted on Twitter.
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.The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter, which generally hide the real website address from users before they click on a link, preventing them from self-filtering links that appear to be dodgy.
Twitter filters URL’s against a blacklist, but only the Bit.ly URL shortener is filtered by Twitter this way.
