I’ve been reading what Sans Internet storm has to say about twitter and how that can bring malware to Twitter. Sans argues that there is no reliable way to determine the information someone says, and that is where I am wanting to talk about the way people are creating what I call Link baiting or Blind links. You ever click on a link in twitter to find it it wasn’t what you thought it was?

[ad]I also thought of what Sopho’s blog about today where someone hijacked 2.2 Million redirect Urls using Cli.gs services to shorten links. I was reading through the Cli.gs blog about the incident and it came from Canada but I don’t think the user of the website who had all that traffic was involved in any way shape or form to the hacking of Cli.gs website. I personally think this was done to prove a point and it is a very good point.

That in the future there will be someone to redirect links to a malware site and it won’t be pretty. Think about it any shorten url service like Tinyurl or others who could have their links all be directed to a website. that is a big number and it worries me. Let us go through the numbers a little bit and see. 98.2% of people go to Tinyurl.com and don’t preview the url first. Half of the clicks in Bit.ly are coming from the US, which means we are more at risk of clicking on a link that could be a virus or malware.

Now I know people don’t have time to check out all the links or forget to check before they click. So I have a few plugins that might help with this.   LongUrl Pluggin  Can use 72 different web services including Bit.ly, Tinyurl, Cli.gs, and a bunch more.  This is a good little plugin to help prevent yourself from clicking those links that you are unsure of.    I would also recommend getting a [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Free Anti-virus and Free Firewall[/intlink] to better protect yoru system.  I wouldn’t use Internet Explorer it seems that is more easier to infect with malware than Firefox.  [intlink id=”3668″ type=”post”]Firefox still has to worry[/intlink] but not as much.