Analysis of Malicious URLs on Twitter

Cyber attack is one of the most serious threats facing many organizations in the Internet era. URLs, and sometimes shortened URLs, in social networking service (SNS) and email messages are exploitable for malicious activities. For example, they redirect users to unexpected resources, e.g. phishing and malware, by obscuring the final destinations. This paper presents the analysis results of malicious messages and URLs sent on Twitter. The results show that about 20% of messages contain at least one URL, 0.1% of messages contain malicious URLs. Almost all of their ends are phishing and 99% of such URLs are shortened ones. The lifetimes of such messages and user accounts used to send are short. They are removed soon after malicious activities: 99% of them are disappeared within one month.