Twitter Launches Anti-Phishing Feature

Del Harvey, who leads Twitter’s trust and safety team, announced on the Twitter Blog that the microblogging service launched a new anti-phishing feature that will allow her team to monitor links in direct messages and emails for potential attacks.

Twitter users have been the victims of recent phishing attacks such as this one and this one.

Harvey posted:

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.

Since these attacks occur primarily on direct messages and email notifications about direct messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind-the-scenes, but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in direct messages and email notifications. Special thanks to @wfarner and @ram for building this service and helping keep us all a little safer!

AllFacebook Marketing Conference returns to San Francisco on June 28-29! Join us and get a how-to guide for marketing to Facebook’s 800 million users. A full agenda will be announced soon. Keep an eye on our event site for more information. Special early pricing is available for only $249 until this Wednesday, February 15, so register today.