Tuesday, November 3, 2009
A Browser Add-On To Help Twitter Users Browse Safely
With regards to Twitter’s exponential growth, an increasing number of spammers, bots or even hackers tried to make use of the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform to either publish malicious links that will lead you to phishing sites or promote their products incessantly. These make up of a relatively large percentage of the total number of tweets posted by users. As URL shortening services like Bit.ly and TinyURL dominate the entire Twitter community, hackers have started to abuse these URLs in tweets and retweets to spread their malware and scareware.
In an unfortunate incident whereby one of your friends’ account has been abused, the hacker may spread malicious links. Most probably you would trust him or her but when you clicked on it, you’re being directed to a “dirty” site. Here’s a tool which helps Twitter users browse safely comes in really handy.
Developed by Finjan, a well-known web security company, SecureTweets is a browser add-on which aims to help Twitter users protect themselves from dangerous malicious shorten links. The clever system scans URLs for malware and a pop-up notification will be shown to warn you before visiting the link.
“Twitter encourages the use of shortened URLs, which could be a problem if, as some reports indicate, the Twitter URL check would only work on full-length Web addresses,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan’s chief technology officer. “Furthermore, the Twitter URL-check utilizes databases that need constant updates. This leaves a window-of-opportunity for cybercriminals to infect Twitter users’ PCs,” added Finjan’s CTO. “During the time elapsing between database updates, no adequate protection will be provided.”
SecureTweets is indeed a simple but very useful creation. Now, I’m able to surf Twitter and click on the shortened links without any much worry that my computer will be infected with viruses or trojans. Currently, the browser extension runs on the Windows OS and supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0, and Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and above.
Labels:Twitter Related
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