The number of Twitter accounts suspended for suspected criminal activity started to rise again during 2010, security company Barracuda Networks has reported.
The company's annual look at 'the dark side of Twitter' plots a gently rising graph of suspensions as criminals returned to target the service and its users after a major cull in late 2009.
According to Barracuda, the average suspension rate was around 2 percent of accounts in the second half of 2010, a rise of 20 percent on the first half of the year. However, the graph also plots some alarming spikes that don't show up in averages, including one that reached above 12 percent for a period of days in December.
Twitter, it appears, succeeded in beating back the massive surge in criminality that hit the service in October 2009 and has now settled into a war of attrition that puts the emphasis on rapid detection of misbehaving and bogus account that try to spread spam and malware.
A live feed of suspected Twitter spam accounts as analysed by Anubis Networks can be found here.
In other areas, while Twitter is making progress against its 'dead zone' - legitimate twitter accounts that show low activity levels - the service is still rather like a noisy conversation in the corner of a large and otherwise silent room.
Source: TechWorld
