Twitter links safer than Google?

Twitter

Despite wide-scale belief that short links on Twitter are often malicious, new research has claimed it is even safer to click on them than Google.

A blog post from Julien Sobrier at Zscaler research has claimed the shortened links from the likes of bit.ly and TinyURL are a lot safer than people think after stuyding one million of them.

He found that only 773 led to malicious page - just 0.06 per cent - although he was just looking for phishing and malware sites rather than including spam.

"The key to protecting end users is real-time scanning of both the URL and the content," wrote Sobrier.

"But remember that only 0.06 per cent of all the URLs tests represented a security risk. It is actually much safer to follow links from Twitter that from some search results on Google!"

In early March, Twitter announced it would be implementing a new system to scan all URLs posted in tweets, but the research was conducted on links posted before this was brought into force.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.