Kaspersky Labs, World-Renowned Internet Security software providers have launched a new tool today called Krab Krawler which examines every post on Twitter and analyses the linked webpages for malware.

Although Twitter microblogging service is limited with 140 characters, but the malware problem arises with malicious short URLs that keeps on lurking on Twitter public posts.

The tool looks at every public post as it appears on Twitter, extracts any URLs in them and analyzes the Web page they lead to, expanding any URLS that have been shortened, Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky, said in an interview.

The company is scanning nearly 500,000 new unique URLs that appear in Twitter posts daily, he said. Of those, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks. Twitter has also been targeted by the Koobface virus which posts malicious links from infected users' accounts.

About 26 percent of the total posts contain URLs, and many of those lead to spam sites that are marketing products or services and aren't considered malware, according to Raiu. Tens of thousands of different accounts are posting spam links, most likely from accounts created by bots, he said. The most frequent URLs posted lead to online dating sites, he added.

Unlike AVG LinkScanner, that relies on the information provided by users and famous search engines, Krab Krawl is a community tool that analyzes URLs in real time ,this tool fetches and extracts URLs that appear in Twitter's public timeline and feeds them into a database for analysis. A set of modules scan each website being linked to by the URL, looking for malware.

Although Twitter uses it's own filtering system to block malware, but it's not effective because the filter seems to work only on URLs shortened by Bit.ly service and there 200+ URL shorteners around the web

Krab Krawler works on top of Twitter's filtering system.The extra layer is useful because of malware's propensity to undergo code changes to avoid detection.But do make sure you have a standard virus scanner running!

In addition to the "Krab Krawler" tool, every Internet user should ensure he is protecting his laptop or computer via a comprehensive security solution such as Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 or Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010.