Twitter crime rate rises 20 percent

Barracuda Labs analyzed more than 26 million Twitter accounts in order to measure and analyze account behavior.

The analysis enabled researchers to model normal user behavior and identify features that are strong indicators of illegitimate account use.

Key highlights from the Twitter research include:

• In general, activity continues to increase on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.
• The number of real Twitter users increased to 43 percent, up from only 29 percent in June 2010.
• For every 100 Twitter users, 39 have between one and nine followers, while 50 percent of Twitter users have more than 10 followers.
• Approximately 79 percent of Twitter users tweet less than once per day.
• After decreasing at the end of 2009, the Twitter crime rate increased 20 percent from the first half of 2010 to the second half of 2010, going from 1.6 percent to 2 percent.
• Attackers are distributing malware and exploiting vulnerabilities to achieve their malicious goals.

The complete report is available here.