Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Would it surprise you to know that yesterday, more than 5000 tweets were posted with URLS which would have dropped you on sites which distribute malware?

It was only a small portion of the total number of tweets containing URLs, around 2.5 million or so, and there were an additional ~200,000 that went to sites about which McAfee was not too sure about the status (we are busy scanning them, as we do all sites which come to our attention where we don’t have a “reputation”). Still – there were 5000 tweets, guaranteed to get you in trouble.

You can guess perhaps, that for a while now McAfee, or rather my Innovation Team has been working on a project to generate some deep analytic evidence from the Twitter fire hose – We’re trying to answer the question “how do you apply the concept of reputation to a social media system?”  Knowing how cyber-criminals use Twitter to entice people to visit their sites is just the first step in the process. Read more…