Kaspersky releases Twitter tool

Kasperky have launched a new tool in their fight against malware called the Krab Krawler.

The tool analyses tweets posted on Twitter for URLs (Uniform Resource Locator, essentially a website’s address) which make up around 26 per cent of all tweets according to Kaspersky.

Many of the URLs in the tweets are shortened using services like tinyurl, bit.ly or myloc.me, and because they are obscured there is a risk that they will lead to a malicious website.

Regular anti-virus software will help protect you, but malware changes so rapidly that a dedicated service like Krab Krawler is now necessary.

“We are scanning nearly 500,000 new unique URLs that appear in Twitter posts every day”, says Costin Raiu, Chief Security Expert Kaspersky Lab EEMEA. “Of those, between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks.”

Although that number may appear to be quite small, social networking sites are an  increasingly common target area for hackers and malware writers. Not only are they popular but people appear to be more willing to click on a link ‘sent’ from a friend.

Twitter does have its own filter service, but some malicious URLs still slip through. The most common bad links is the Trojan-Clicker.HTMLIFrame, a malicious JavaScript that can get downloaded to a computer when it visits a compromised site.

The tool examines every public post that appears on Twitter, extracting any URLs they contain and then analyses the web page they lead to.

Tomas Mowlam

Image by visualdensity