Dangerous Trap of Shortening URLs

One of the advantages of the most popular in Twitter is information that can be disseminated very quickly. Unfortunately, this situation is misused by cyber criminals. According to security firm Symantec, they just check the Twitter main page for the topic that is becoming a trend, which shows a message that has several times announced. Attackers choose one of the tweets that contains a short URL, which is replaced with a another short URLs, which point to a malicious website.

Because the text in the message is the same, users do not know that the new short URL to point to a malicious website, not to the original news. Therefore some links will follow wherever it leads, and this can not be avoided.  Although not impossible, it is difficult to say whether a post is genuine or not just by looking. The user may want to install the browser which leads to a short URL.

Nevertheless, it is very difficult to identify a malicious link, because of frequent a website legitimate hijacked and transformed into host drive-by download attacks. Therefore, it is a good idea if you patched computers and software - including its browser and has installed security software, so do not become victims of drive-by download attacks. Twitter also says that they are working actively on other features that they believe will enhance the safety and security of users.