Kaspersky Offers Protection from Twitter Malware

Posted 10/29/2009 at 11:33am | by Bart Salisbury

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There’s creepy things afoot on the web, and what’s better to combat them than something crawly? Internet security company Kaspersky Lab has introduced the “Krab Krawler”, an anti-malware tool that can make your Twitter-hungry lifestyle a little bit safer.

Krab Crawler examines every public post that appears on Twitter. The posts are parsed for URLs which, if present, are traced to their origin. (Even shortened URLs are recognized.) The site is then checked for any creepy things, such as the Koobface virus, that might make your day less tweety.

Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, says the Krab Krawler pulls out about half a million new, unique URLs from Twitter posts each day. In these Krab Krawler finds between a hundred and a thousand linked to malware attacks. Raiu also notes that about 26 percent of these URLs link to spam sites, so even if a URL doesn’t pose a deadly threat, there’s a one-in-four chance it leads to an annoyance.

Krab Krawler works on top of Twitter’s own filtering system. The extra layer is useful because of malware’s propensity to undergo code changes to avoid detection. Raiu estimates it takes two to 12 hours to pick up on such changes and properly identify a new malware strain.

In addition to Kaspersky Lab, Trend Micro also monitors Twitter posts for malware. And Finjan offers a free browser plug-in, SecureTwitter, that warns users of URLs of dubious character.

Image Credit: thomwisdom/flickr