Beware of Clicking Twitter Links

It’s very risky to click on links, any links, be it in emails, in social networking sites, etc. A recent study said that there has been a 233% increase of malicious sites on the Internet, almost all propagating through social networking and emails. Yikes.

Twitter is especially susceptible to malicious clicking. Because urls are shortened for Twitter, the users cannot tell where the link is going. Who knows whether the link truly leads to Aunt Sally’s wedding dress, iscsi san or a worm? There are now several browser addons and such for detecting the origins of shortened urls, but still, it’s very difficult to know exactly where you are being led. And who knows what trojan, phishing scam, or virus awaits.

Symantec recently warned of the dangers of clicking links in Twitter:

The security software company released a warning and a video Friday on the dangers of clicking on the short URLs that link users from a tweet to a story, photo or video. Twitter isn’t the only place on the web users might find such shortened web addresses, but it is the most popular one.

The problem is that you don’t know where it will take you in most cases until you click on the link, something Symantec said malware authors have caught on to.

“Using enticing tweets and commonly used twitter search terms, their goal is to get other users to click on their links, leading to malicious code,” the Cupertino company said.

It offered examples with a YouTube video, which can be seen by clicking here.

The company said that in addition to its own security software, some browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer allow users to check the full URL of a link before clicking on it.

“While this won’t tell you for sure if the link is malicious, it will at least allow you to look more carefully before clicking,” the company said in its post.

I heard in August that Twitter was starting to filter links that pass through their system, but I haven’t heard it directly from Twitter. Have you? Symantec published their statement about Twitter-clicking over the weekend, so I assume malicious links still pass through.

Nonetheless, please be careful what links you click!