Ever since Twitter gained in popularity, hackers and spammers have been using the service to direct traffic to their unsavory web sites.
Such hauls fall well short of extravagant claims from the security industry that some spammers make millions every day.
Although filtering techniques work quite well, we recognize that spammers will always try to attack them.
URL shortening services like or , recently launched by Google, are popular with spammers because they conceal URLs that message recipients might otherwise find suspicious.
There will always be a few spammers, of course, who are willing to pay the price to get through to our mailboxes, but the flood will turn into a trickle.
For example, some spammers hire people to circumvent all the controls discussed in this article (sometimes called a "mechanical Turk" attack).
