Twitter boosts security with automatic link shortening feature
Twitter has turned on a new feature designed to automatically shorten URLs before they are displayed as links, and has added improved security capabilities which will warn users if they are about to follow malicious links.
Carolyn Penn of the firm's communications team shared the news in a blog post, saying that many Twitter users had asked for the feature. "Just paste a link of any length into the Tweet box on Twitter.com. After you've composed your Tweet and you hit the 'Tweet' button, we'll shorten the link so that it only takes up 19 characters," she wrote.
The feature uses Twitter's link service at http://t.co and has been designed to better protect against links posted on the site by cyber criminals hoping to lure people into clicking on malicious and phishing links.
