Security is the most important point of concern in today's world. Living in the modern era, you need to keep yourself updated and secure. The security is not only from the other sources, but also within the walls. The security is not here termed for one's life, but for the system's life. Yes, the system needs to be protected against the ill practices and malwares.
Twitter has a character limit, as known, so to maintain that it usually limits it's URLs to a few character link. To check for the accuracy and the uninterrupted environment, the Computer Scientists from Cardiff University have created an intelligent system that can check the malicious links for the malware in shortened Twitter URLs. As the people are increasing with the social networks such as Twitter, the large scale events also leads to high volume traffic, creating a perfect environment for the cyber-crimes and attacks. The scientists have therefore, created a system by collecting the tweets containing URLs during the 2015 Superbowl and cricket world cup finals, and monitored interactions between a website and a user's device to recognise the features of a malicious attack.
The system designed is so accurate that it could identify 83 percent accurate result within 5 seconds and 93 percent accuracy rate in 30 seconds when a user clicked on a URL posted on Twitter and when malware began to infect the device. Principal investigator on the project, professor Omer Rana, said, "We are trying to build systems that can help law enforcement authorities make decisions in a changing cyber-security landscape".
As per the researches done by the scientists, a lead scientist, Pete Burnap said, "Attackers can hide links to malicious servers in a post masquerading as an attractive or informative piece of information about the event. URLs are always shortened on Twitter due to character limitations in posts, so it is incredibly difficult to know which are legitimate". Further elaborating the point that, once if the computer gets infected with the malware then it will turn up to a zombie system that can hide the information and help the attacker to route further attacks, becoming a part of global network of machines. "In a 2013 report from Microsoft these 'drive-by downloads' were identified as one of the most active and commercial risks to cyber-security", Burnap said.
