BANGALORE: Microblogging website Twitter has declared war against spammers who recently seem to have started targeting the site for phishing and other spam attacks. In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter announced that it has filed a suit in a Federal Court in San Francisco against five of the ‘most aggressive tool providers and spammers by going straight to the source’.
According to reports, the defendants listed in the suit are TweetAttacks, TweetAdder, TweetBuddy, James Lucero of justinlover.info and Garland E Harris of troption.com. The companies market themselves as services to help a Twitter user gain followers and thus take control of the users account creating a ‘bot’ which then targets other real users with links and spam.
Stating that ‘bad actors’ who built tools designed to distribute spam were the challenge in battling spam, Twitter’s post stated, “Today we are adding another weapon to our arsenal : the law.” Twitter hopes that the 5 suits filed would act as a deterrent for other spammers.
However, the site’s efforts to combat spam have not just stopped at lawsuits. Twitter has gone ahead and introduced new measures to deal with newer types of @mention spam. The site has also adopted link shortener (t.co) which converts regular links into shorter t.co ones and also compares them with a list of potentially dangerous sites. Other popular sites like Facebook have already adopted link shortener technologies.
Twitter claimed an active user database of 140 million Tweeters who generate more than 340 million Tweets every day. It had recently acquired Dasient, a web security company and stated that it is ‘committed to fight spam on all fronts’.