Be careful if you let staff use Twitter: Symantec

As Twitter has become an up-to-date news source for millions of people due to the speed with which news spreads through the network, businesses need to continuously educate their employees who use Twitter to ensure that the source is trustworthy, says Symantec, an IT services firm.

As with many social networking sites, Twitter is being targeted with malicious activity, Symantec said in a statement sent to Emirates 24|7.

Attackers select tweets that contain a popular topic and a shortened URL. The original URL is then replaced with a different shortened URL, pointing to a malicious website, Symantec said while explaining the modus operandi of malicious attacks via Twitter.

It is still very hard for users to spot the malicious links, as it is often a legitimate website that has been compromised and converted to host drive-by download attacks, Symantec said.

Having your computer and software patched and having security software installed, could decrease the chances of falling victim to such drive-by download attacks, added the firm that sells corporate and individual security software.

Twitter has done some preliminary work to prevent the attacks. One tactic employed offer users the opportunity to “expand” the shortened links to show where the link leads without having to actually click the link. Work is still being done to ensure that all shortened URLs become expandable, Symantec said.

According to Symantec Hosted Services research, spam containing shortened URLs hit a one-day peak of 18 per cent (or 23.4 billion) of all spam emails in 2010, a significant increase from 9 per cent in 2009.

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