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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Microblogging

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.

Filed under: Business, Internet, Utilities, Social Software

AOL badware?

aol badwareAOL has been blacklisted on StopBadware.org due to the main fact that it installs additional software with AOL 9.0 without telling the user. The test of the free AOL 9.0 that StopBadware.org tested, reportedly got the bad grade because AOL did not live up to their "rich legacy" as stated by StopBadware.org co-director John Palfrey. Palfrey says this was the only reason why AOL had got dumped into the same category as malicious badware providers.

AOL has said that they are reviewing the report, and that no company has done more to fight malware than AOL. AOL is taking steps to ensure that the issues are addressed, and that they involve only minor UI changes.

Filed under: Security, Windows

Computer security companies gang up on spyware

McAfee
Anti-spywareBBC News is reporting that five computer security firms, ICSA Labs, McAfee, Symantec, Thompson Cyber Security Labs, and Trend Micro, are joining forces to combat spyware. The partnership, which has yet to be given a snappy name, will be collaborating to create a common naming system for spyware and cooperating to create tools to stop spyware. The companies, which say the amount of spyware in circulation increases by 50-100% every year, hope to "remove some of the current confusion caused by anti-spyware firms managing their own labelling and removal method."

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