Twitter: October 2008 Archives

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The problem with that was although the Twitter messages containing rogue weblinks were now gone, any URLs placed into the Profile description bar on the right were still clickable.

This was, as you might imagine, not a good thing.

Replacing the entire content of a suspended profile is a welcome step in the right direction for Twitter. One small problem - though the profile content may now be entirely inaccessible, the suspended profiles are still viewable in Profile Search. Because of this, if you happen to come across an already suspended profile that harboured infection links in the Profile description....

....you can still reach the infection pages via the search option. Hopefully Twitter will find a way to scrub the infection link profiles from the search feature, too.

All in all, a good move to combat the increasing amounts of rogue profiles clogging up Twitter - and kudos to them on waving the Banhammer at so many spam profiles overnight. Quite the bloodbath, from the looks of things...

Very peculiar. If you visit the profile, it's already been suspended.



The account only sent out the one message before the plug was pulled. There are two possibilities here:

1) The scammer registered the "nod32antivirus" username on Twitter to try and get money from ESET in return for the nod32antivirus username on Twitter, which is about as poorly thought out a plan as it sounds.

2) The message refers to the sale of the website listed in the single Twitter message, though the way it's worded (and the fact that this person randomly decided to register nod32antivirus as their username) would tend to make this rather unlikely. Either way, Twitter thought there was something sufficiently strange here to suspend the account.

I EMailed the site owner anyway, and have so far had no reply. If I actually get a response, I'll update the entry...