Enabling Phishing Protection for All SocialToo Users
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I’m proud to announce that along with Friday’s new design and DM inbox launch, SocialToo has officially enabled protection for all 60,000+ users from malicious and phishing DMs that could lead to spammers and hackers stealing users passwords. Previously we had only enabled this for our users that were using the DM Filters found under “Filters” in the SocialToo interface. This move is unprecedented, in that we hope this makes Twitter a much safer place.
In the past, as we’ve reported, Twitter has been subject to very large-scale phishing attacks, causing users that clicked on links in DMs to be tricked into providing their Twitter username and passwords. These accounts would then become compromised, providing an avenue for more spam, often unknown to those whose accounts were compromised. We’ve found that no one is immune to this, as even some of the largest accounts on Twitter have been subject to such compromise.
Starting today any SocialToo user that logs in through Twitter will have proactive protection on their Twitter account DMs. We will scan each DM, show the clean DMs in your SocialToo Inbox, and delete and filter out any DMs we detect are malicious. No DM filters are necessary to protect from truly malicious dms – it all happens automatically for our users. In addition to deleting the DM from Twitter, we also send a DM on your behalf to @spam on Twitter notifying the Twitter team of the compromised accounts. We hope that this can help Twitter identify the compromised accounts more easily. We will also be communicating compromised accounts via other means to Twitter as well.
So far, SocialToo has blocked a total of 19,814 malicious DMs just amongst the 2,000 or so users that have implemented this feature. We expect this number to get much, much bigger now that 30 times that number are having their DMs filtered. A fun thing to do is in your SocialToo Inbox, refresh the page and look at the “Total SocialToo DMs filtered to date” number in the lower-right. You’ll notice it goes up almost every time – that number is accurate! We also detect these much, much earlier than Twitter is able to.
As has always been a priority, we feel keeping your stream clean and the web in general a cleaner place is important. Hopefully this makes a significant change in how clean the streams of Twitter users are. If you have any suggestions on how we can make it even cleaner, drop us a note!