Spammers have found a new way to use Twitter. This one lets them harvest email addresses easily, and use these addresses to do their dirty business. The good news is that you can avoid this practice by simply not tweeting your email address.
I was having a talk with Twellow's lead developer Matthew Daines, and he pointed out that a simple query on Twitter Search can return large numbers of email addresses that spammers could potentially exploit.
"It would be trivial to write a script that gathers these addresses," he added. "They could have several hundred thousand over a few weeks at the rate they trickle in."
The ability to search for email addresses has always existed on search engines like Google, but Twitter and it's real-time updates brings a whole new element to the matter. They come in fast, and they're always going to be up to date. This is why it could be enticing for spammers.
"The Twitter stream really weeds out all sorts of irrelevant data and cuts right to the email addresses within 140 characters, so it's a lot less intense, and would require very little coding skill," says Daines. "The thing is this makes it just too easy to get email addresses."
WebPro News article
I was having a talk with Twellow's lead developer Matthew Daines, and he pointed out that a simple query on Twitter Search can return large numbers of email addresses that spammers could potentially exploit.
"It would be trivial to write a script that gathers these addresses," he added. "They could have several hundred thousand over a few weeks at the rate they trickle in."
The ability to search for email addresses has always existed on search engines like Google, but Twitter and it's real-time updates brings a whole new element to the matter. They come in fast, and they're always going to be up to date. This is why it could be enticing for spammers.
"The Twitter stream really weeds out all sorts of irrelevant data and cuts right to the email addresses within 140 characters, so it's a lot less intense, and would require very little coding skill," says Daines. "The thing is this makes it just too easy to get email addresses."
WebPro News article
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