Learn how to protect yourself from Twitter phishing attacks and phishing scams.
Phishers, scammers and spammers have been exploiting Twitter for a very long time. I have seen links to well known phishing sites in tweets for months now and I was kind of surprised to see Twitterers only took notice of phishing scams/attacks earlier today. They must be blind or something! Just take a few sample tweets from Twitter’s public timeline right now and sooner or later you are bound to come across links to phishing sites!
How to protect yourself from Twitter Phishing Scams and Twitter Phishing Attacks
1. Most browsers (latest versions) come with anti-phishing features but many users disabled such features because they affect performance and browsing experience. Don’t do that; enable those anti-phishing features right now!
2. One of the reasons why phishers, scammers and spammers love Twitter is because Twitter loves those mysterious looking short URLs. Twitter has to love short URLs because without them, it is almost impossible to share anything in short tweets. Short URLs are so common there on Twitter that nobody seems to question their very existence. :)
The good news I have for you today is that you can actually kill, see-through or lengthen those dubious short URLs and that will ultimately protect yourself from phishing attacks and phishing scams. To kill shortURLs, Twitterers must use 3rd-party applications such as Long URL Please (voted as one of 5 Essential or Must-Have Twitter Tools for 2009). By seeing-through short URLs, Twitterers can at least see where those links would lead them to. If they look suspicious, don’t even bother to go and click on them.
RSS
0 comments:
Post a Comment