Kaspersky Labhas developed a tool for
identifyingmalicious shortened weblinks in tweets posted on the
Twitter microblogging service.
More than a quarter of tweets posted on Twitter contain links,
many of which are shortened using services like
bit.ly and myloc.me.
Although Twitter does filter for malicious links, security
experts have warned that shortened links are
not always blocked.
The danger is that shortened links obscure the destination and
anyone clicking on these links could
connect unwittingly to a malicious website.
The "Krab Krawler" tool by Kaspersky Lab supports the virus
analysts in the labs to detect attacks over Twitter by analysing
the millions of tweets.
"We are scanning nearly 500,000 new unique links that appear in
Twitter posts every day", said Costin Raiu, said chief security
expert at Kaspersky Lab.
According to Costin Raiu, up to 2% of the links scanned are
connected to malware of some kind. These links will be identified
and blocked for users of Kaspersky products.