Spammers May Have Another Trick in Twitter

There have been plenty of complaints about Twitter spam, but what about spam as a result of our own tweeting? We have come to expect our Twitter streams to contain plenty of marketing messages (and perhaps the occasional worm), but some users may be unknowingly contributing to the spam that they find in their email inboxes.

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. Results for such a query might look something like this:

"You can sit and just watch the email addresses steadily trickle in," he noted. "I wouldn’t doubt it if spammers are harvesting these."

"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."

The lesson here is: Don’t throw your email address in your tweets unless you want it to be searchable. That means it will be vulnerable to this kind of practice.

Some are probably thinking that this is common sense, but looking at the query that the above screenshot is lifted from makes it pretty clear that people are not really thinking about this. And if they are, they must not care.