The Twitter Malware Problem Is Getting Worse
via Softpedia News - Global by Softpedia News (Lucian Constantin) on 9/26/09
Using independently developed tools that scan tweets for threats, security researchers from Kaspersky and Trend Micro concluded that the micro-blogging platform has become a popular attack vector. The number of malicious URLs identified on Twitter suggest that the problem is slowly, but surely getting worse. Because the results of their independent research into the Twitter attacks problem were almost identical, Costin Raiu, chief security expert with Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team, and Mortom Swimmer, advanced threat researcher at Trend Micro, have decided to give a joint presentation of their findings during the Virus Bulletin 2009 conference being held this week in Geneva. The Kaspersky team led by Mr. Raiu built a service to analyze URLs posted in tweets, which they dubbed “Krab Krawler.” The tool watches the public Twitter timeline, which currently averages to 300 tweets per second, and extracts the URLs from them. In order to process most, if not all, of the tweets, the researchers had to get their tool added to a special Twitter whitelist, which allows them to perform 20,000 queries per hour, with a query being able to return multiple results. All the identified URLs are saved in a database, but because most of them are shortened, a common practice on Twitt... (read more)