Part of the new feature will absorb the use of Twitter’s articulation shortener twt.tl, which may now alpha popping up in some of your emails and direct messages. Twitter has just announced that it is ablution a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the account for potentially malicious attacks.
We just ran a test at the TC appointment with two different links: one for an article on GigaOm, and another for a bit.ly articulation that pointed to a page on Google Buzz. The links I received on my Twitter client were both unchanged, but both were converted to twt.tl links in our Email notifications (obviously neither of them had malicious content). At this point, it’s not really bright which links are being converted to Twitter’s twt.tl shortened links.
Today, were ablution a new account to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. Even if a bad articulation is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe. 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.
Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is area 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.
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