In news that will be welcomed by the thousands of Twitter users who have fallen prey to a phishing attack, the popular micro blogging site has decided to fight back.

Del Harvey, director of Twitter’s trust and safety team announced the roll-out of its new security service in a blog post yesterday.

Twitter can now detect, intercept and prevent the spread of malicious links before they reach an intended victim.

“Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks,” mr Harvey said in the post.

“Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”

The system is similar to current Gmail security, which automatically checks link destinations, and works by all submitted links being routed to this new service.

It is currently live in Twitter’s Direct Messages and email notifications, where attackers hit the hardest.

Users won’t notice any difference to their normal use of Twitter, except for seeing shortened links using Twitter’s own “twt.tl” URL shortener.

Before the implementation of this security feature this week, Twitter had previously kept an eye out for accounts that had been hit by a phishing scam, and had then reset affected account passwords.

While this method thwarted the attempts of phishers, it only worked in reaction to an account being hacked in the first place.

“My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out,” mr Harvey said.

Twitter’s new system aims to prevent the security risk before an attacker can get a look in.

In a previous blog posting, Twitter noted that the most wide-spread attacks on its site involved scammers attempting to gain the log in credentials of users, before sending spam messages from the hacked accounts in an attempt to make money.

Have you ever swum with the phishers? Leave us a comment and let us know.

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