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Sunday, January 8, 2012

Warning to spammers on Twitter - I take computer security seriously

Lately, I have been receiving text messages on my cell phone from Twitter accounts that are trying to lure me to malicious websites. I use two really great plugins, WIPMania for knowing where a website's geographic location and Web_Of_Trust (or WOT) for knowing the reputation of the website I am visiting, for Firefox. I also use Linux exclusively. Your malware will never affect me for more that a few minutes
When any twitter user that follows me or mentions me in a tweet I do two things:
  1. I check out your profile
  2. I check a number of your tweets
If a profile lists a website, I visit it. Any links in the tweets, I visit them also. If I am suspicious, I check the sites listed/mentioned using Firefox. If WIPMania reports the site is located in China, I report the twitter user for spamming. If WOT reports a bad reputation that includes spamming, spreading malware and/or phishing activities, I report the Twitter user for spamming.

The reason I check these sites are to get a better understanding of the person following me. If their website is interesting, I follow. If the links in tweets leads to interesting articles, I retweet and follow. When I follow an account, I add the account to one of my lists that is related to topics the user tweets about the most.

Lately, every day I have been getting a number twitter users sending me messages to my cell phone that leads to a site containing malware. Also every day I have been getting a number of Twitter users that send out tweets with links to malicious website. They all been reported.

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