BitDefender announced its Twitter malware protection service Safego is now an open beta and users can sign up here for the free service. It is similar to the service that they have had for Facebook that we last wrote about here. Once you authorize it to use your Twitter account, it begins to process all your tweets, DMs and embedded links to see what is going on.
As you can see from a snippet of its dashboard, you are informed about friends who haven’t recently used their accounts in some time (that could be possible spammers, or it could just be a false positive and someone who has grown disenchanted with Tweeting); any links that point to nasty places on the Net; other obvious threats that are detected; and other warnings. You can set it up to warn you weekly, or let your friends know that they accounts have been compromised (I would suggest not doing that for the moment, until the tool is further developed),and to scan your private messages. It will take several minutes to process your entire Twitter stream, depending on how many followers and messages you have.
It certainly can’t hurt to have someone of BitDefender’s caliber looking over your shoulder at your Tweets, and it can help in some cases to have this form of protection. And it is free.