14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter announced the availability of a new feature that would help users of the micro-blogging platform fight spammers themselves. A button called "Report as Spam" has been added to the Action section on every profile's sidebar and pressing it will alert the service's Trust and Safety team.
Twitter faced a lot of security problems this year because its popularity attracted the interest of cybercrooks. A lot of attacks were adapted to work on the platform, while completely new ones have been devised specifically to target the service.
Just to name a few, this year, Twitter saw its first clickjacking attack, its first social networking worm, its first Koobface variant and its first scareware distribution campaign. Additionally, it has been used as a botnet command and control server, the accounts of its staff have been hijacked and its corporate secrets have been leaked.
These attacks prompted Twitter to treat security more seriously and in August, it introduced a malicious URL filter that relies on the Google Safe Browsing API. This effort was appreciated by the security community, even though it still leaves a lot of room for improvement.
However, security researchers claim that the Twitter spam problem is growing worse and that spammers are developing new techniques to avoid filters. The admins of the popular service are apparently well aware that automated solutions will not be enough to fight off spam and have decided to tap into Twitter's most valuable resource, its own user base.
"Folks can now help us conquer spam by calling our attention to a profile they find questionable. Click the 'Report as spam' button under the Actions section of a profile’s sidebar and our Trust and Safety team will check it out to see what needs to be done," Twitter's Jenna Dawn announces on the company's official blog.
It is worth noting that in order to limit possible abuse, the profiles reported for spam through this feature will not be subject to any automated actions. Instead, they will be reviewed manually by specialized Twitter staff. However, reporting a profile for spam will also block it from following or sending messages to the reporter.
Twitter describes the behavior associated with spamming as posting harmful links, abusing the @reply feature to send unsolicited messages, creating a large number of accounts, posting duplicate updates repeatedly, posting links with unrelated tweets, abusing trending topics or mass following and un-following.