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Twitter Takes Strides to Block Bad Links

by Tim Stevens on August 4, 2009 at 11:01 AM

Twitter Finally Saving Users from Malicious Links

Links to cool stuff spread on Twitter like wildfire, and that's part of what makes the service so great. If somebody sees something interesting, they tweet it, their friends then pass it along, and within a few minutes it has spread across the whole of the Internet. The problem is that bad links can take advantage of that same system and spread just as quickly, a problem that Twitter is finally addressing directly.

Although no official announcement has been made to this effect, PaidContent.org noted yesterday that Twitter has begun to check all tweets for URLs and, if one is found, check it against a database of known bogus sites. If a match is found, the site stops the tweet dead, saying: "Oops! Your tweet contains a URL to a known malware site!" That update is then prevented from being posted and, in theory, all that tweeter's followers protected.

We're sure some nasty-minded folks will find a way around this, if only by making new malicious sites faster than others can track them. By the same token, we'd imagine that scammers will continue to find some success with URL-shorteners (the largest thorn in Twitter's side) by creating many aliases for the same, infected site. Still, for the moment at least, Twitter's should be an effective way to stop links to bad sites. Now, if only Twitter could do something about those bogus celebrity death tweets. [From: Paid Content]

Tags: malware, security, spam, top, twitter, url shortener, UrlShortener

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