Twitter has been targeted by users with malicious intents ever since it started to become increasingly popular. One of the biggest problems up to yesterday were direct messages which one Twitter user could send to another. Links posted in those direct messages were not scanned by Twitter before they were send out, only after they have been.
This meant that it was extremely easy to attack Twitter users by sending them direct messages containing links that lead to malicious websites or executed malicious code on the computer system.
Yesterday Del Harvey, the Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, announced a major change to how direct messages are processed by Twitter.
The service basically added a scan to all urls that are posted as direct messages on Twitter before they reach the recipient making it possible to protect users from most threats that are spread through direct messages.
Twitter can now “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter” by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service”. The information on how the processed messages are handled are a little vague. Dan only mentions that most Twitter users will not notice this new security measure at all and that that those that will notice “links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications”.
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Now this is good news. I only hope the reliability will be high enough to counterbalance the lost of awareness induced by this service.