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Twitter is full of criminals and celebrities
ACCORDING TO Barracuda Networks the micro-blogging service Twitter is full of the worst kinds of people, that is, criminals and celebrities.
Barrucada has just finished a study of Twitter, in which it looked at almost 19 million Twitter accounts and analysed their content and interactions.
"The bottom line is this: users are more active on Twitter; more users joined Twitter in 2009 following a massive influx of celebrities to the site; and sure enough, the criminals followed the users in a forceful way causing the overall Twitter Crime Rate to spike", it said.
Celebrities, those people you either see on the television screen or in the papers lurching between clubs and cabs, caused a spike in users in between 2008 and April 2009, according to Barracuda.
This period, described as the Twitter Red Carpet Era, not only saw celebrities sign up, along with their fanbases, causing big gains in the number of Twitter members, but also brought large numbers of criminals with it.
"As millions of users flocked to Twitter during the Twitter Red Carpet Era, so too did the criminals" said the firm. "During this time, numerous accounts were used for malicious purposes such as poisoning trending topic threads with malicious URLs (hidden by the ever popular URL shortening services) aimed at luring Twitter users to sites carrying malware or other malicious content".
This got so bad, Barrucada said, that by October of last year one in eight new accounts was deemed 'malicious'.
But Twitter is proactively dealing with these threats and today Del Harvey, the head of Twitter's trust and safety group announced a new system designed to tackle phishing scans perpetrated through its pages.
"By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe."
Harvey said that for the most part users will not notice the changes, but added that if they do it will be in shortened URLs, specifically ones containing "twt.tl". µ
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What is barrucada that you are mindful of him???
ditto
Doesn't sound too pleasant to have all your links go though their censoring and monitoring.
And it might make them culpable too when the competition want to get twitter in trouble they can use it as an attack vector in court, like say "you linked a brit to a site about suicide and that makes you responsible" and BS like that.
On the other hand, obscured links on twitter always seemed madness to me, I know from chats what links can lead to, and you have to be quite strong (in nerves and stomach) and clever (to avoid attacks and malware) to handle that.