Twitter is now blocking Harmful Links – Unofficially

Twitter the popular online microblogging site has begun to block links that contain references to malicious sites. F-secure Security Labs first reported this activity on their blog sometime after suggesting to Twitter that filtering traffic will help to reduce the spread of malware.

Since links are the majority capital on Twitter some misaligned users, will send out a tweet(s) that contains a URL reference to a malicious site. This message can then be quickly spread to other users unsuspectedly through retweets and false accounts.

When the unsuspecting user clicks on one of these malicious links they are taken to a site that attempts to elicit the user to purchase false virus protection software, place a trojan on the users computer, place a virus on the users computer, and much more.

Twitter has not publicly announced these efforts, and it is my guess that they are still in the alpha phases of the rolling this filter completely out. The is largely due to the fact that, at the time of this post, Twitter currently does not filter out shortened links.

Shorten links are usually created from a third party service such as is.gd or TinyURL. Shortened URLs basically mask larger link with a new shorter version. Theses url shorting services allow Twitter users to get more bang for their buck from twitter. Which as most of you know only allows 140 charaters per micro post.

While Twitter’s plans are not completely known at this time, it is good to know that Twitter is making some effort to getting rid of these negative types of URLs.