Twitter begins filtering malicious URLs - what took so long?

Earlier this week, the folks over at Sunbelt noted that Twitter was working on a new feature. While there's nothing posted to blog.twitter.com about the development, it's no secret that their developers have started giving the bird to malicious links.

As of now, Twitter's blocking powers are pretty limited. On a good note, the services appears to be tied in to Google's Safe Browsing service.

However, only bit.ly short URLs are supported - the other 30million providers are not. Furthermore, URLs which lack http:// or have are posted as downloadsquad.com (without the www.) are not checked. Sunbelt also points out that Twitter doesn't currently utilize Stopbadware.org's database of nearly half a million malicious URLs.

Ok, so it's not much, but it's a start. When you look at Twitter's popularity and the number of users (or bots) using the service to spread links to "questionable" websites, there's no denying this is a good thing. Since it doesn't take much more expertise than that posessed by a bored highschool programming student to spread a worm on Twitter, countermeasures are clearly necessary.

Hopefully they'll continue working to improve link filtering. No, Twitter isn't a security company, but this should be a very high priority. If Twitter really does want to be the "pulse of the Internet" as noted in those riveting leaked docs, they're going to have to make sure the circulatory system stays relatively disease-free.

Tags: badware, malicious, malware, phishing, twitter