Spam is an ever-growing concern on Twitter. As Twitter emerged from a simple SMS service to one of the world’s most popular micro-blogging website, spammers takes advantage of it as a tool by replying to your @username or send you a direct message, which then causes the tweets to show up in your timeline. Some other common forms of Twitter spam includes retweet spam (searches for legitimate tweets and reposts them in the system but with a different, malicious URL) and trending subjects spam (searches for hot topics on Twitter like Michael Jackson’s death and posts similar tweets with different, malicious URLs)
In an unfortunate case, you may fall prey to some of the most common tricks regularly employed by hackers. So how to avoid them? Well, the folks at BitDefender offer 5 crucial tips of how to prevent from falling into spam traps.
1. Install a comprehensive security solution on your computer – preferably a suite containing antivirus, firewall and a phishing filter.
2. Follow the spam profile on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spam. Users can find good advice here. For example, a recent post states: “If you gave your login and password info to TwitViewer, we strongly suggest you change your password now. Thanks!”
3. Do not click on all the links you receive.
4. Disable the ‘auto followback’ option. This will allow you to pick and chose who you want to follow.
5. Make sure you know who you are following.