Twitter Users Subject to 17 Dangerous Messages per Day

The security experts revealed that some of your Twitter followers might be spammers, who hope you will follow them back out of courtesy. After you will, they may try to spam you, if not infect your PC with malware.

Computer experts claimed average Twitter user may receive up to 17 dangerous messages daily. But they also offered help to those who suspect being threatened to this, with new software called SafeGo. The program in question is able to weed out dangerous followers.

Today there are over 200 million registered users on the service, with 200 million tweets being sent on a daily basis. However, much more tweets are received per day – up to 350 billion, as each message is usually sent to a large number of people. This statistics was provided by BitDefender’s technical officer Catalin Cosoi, who introduced their new SafeGo software last week. The company has also claimed that their figures showed 1% of the tweets were malicious, containing spam, or links to online locations containing viruses or other malware. In other words, around 3.5 billion dangerous messages are sent per day, which for an average user may mean up to 17 nasty Tweets. While most are just spam, as lots of spammers track keywords trending on the service and then send out spam with those words, others may contain malicious software.

The software the company introduced, SafeGo, flags the alleged spammers in the list of people you follow with four colors, which are ranging up to red for very suspicious, like users having sent spam or malicious links. In other words, it makes it easy to pinpoint your followers who may not actually be friends, and consequently block them. In addition, the software will also notify you by instant message if your new follower seems suspicious provided you keep the software running.