Key highlights from the Twitter research include:
- In general, activity continues to increase on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.
- The number of True Twitter Users increased to 43 percent, up from only 29 percent in June 2010.
- For every 100 Twitter users, 39 have between one and nine followers, while 50 percent of Twitter users have more than 10 followers.
- Approximately 79 percent of Twitter users tweet less than once per day.
- After decreasing at the end of 2009, the Twitter Crime Rate increased 20 percent from the first half of 2010 to the second half of 2010, going from 1.6 percent to 2 percent.
- Attackers are distributing malware and exploiting vulnerabilities to achieve their malicious goals.
Protecting Profiles on Facebook and Twitter
Barracuda Labs also announced the availability of its new Profile Protector, a free service that protects social networking users against malicious threats on Facebook and Twitter and is available at http://profileprotector.com/ . The application analyzes user-generated content posted to profiles and is able to block or remove malicious or suspicious content. This includes malicious URLs, embedded photos and/or videos on Facebook and Twitter pages and news feeds.
Footnotes:
1 – ‘True Twitter User’ is defined as a user that has at least (≥) 10 followers, follows at least (≥) 10 people, and has tweeted at least (≥) 10 times.
2 – ‘Twitter Crime Rate’ is defined as the percentage of accounts created per month that were eventually suspended for malicious or suspicious activity, or otherwise misused.
3 – ‘Tweet Number’ is defined as a user’s average number of tweets per day.
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