In an effort to combat phishing and spam, which has been an unsolved issue for Twitter for the past years, the micro-blogging platform yesterday said in a blog post that they have rolled out its own URL shortener called Twt.tl to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks.
Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.
With this service put in place, Twitter hopes to prevent the spread of malicious links across the site by checking whether a particular URL leads to a trustworthy website or not. Twitter will shorten URLs sent in email notifications and direct messages with their own shortener, and then see if they match a database of potential web forgeries. In a case whereby a test is positive, Twitter will then display a warning screen when users click the link from their email.
Twitter said that they are releasing the feature by stages.
You can view more information over at Twitter’s Help page.
Image credt: TechRaga