Cyber attacks are growing vigorously in the internet world. Recently hackers attacked a popular social networking site, Twitter ,where users can post 140 character messages to their friends, resulting in the shutdown of Twitter for two hours on Thursday (06/08/2009) morning and caused glitches in world’s popular social networking site Facebook.

Twitter and Face book users were not able to access the networking sites for several hours on the day. Even after the Twitter site come back online, many site users continuously encountered some problems. The site users were worried that the sites were not working properly.

“We are trying to defend ourselves and recover from this attack,” the message from the company says. After a lot of discussions, Facebook, Twitter and Google worked together to resolve issues in a fairly short period of time. Users are now posting their messages to their followers without any difficulty.

“It is very difficult to identify hackers and when they will attack as they could be anywhere in the world” said John Harrison, a researcher with the Web security firm Symantec. So it is better to update an anti-virus software on your computer frequently, and create password that is difficult to crack and stay away from the cyber attack problems, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness agency advices.

Tweetblocker is a free tool that comes from Hashrocket Labs as a boon for Twitter users and application developers, to block spammers from their Twitter account. It uses highly advanced filtering technique to catalog and rank the top spammers on Twitter, thereby allowing users to quickly and easily find spammers.

All you have to do is go to the TweetBlocker site and register in it. Once you handle your Twitter account details, Tweetblocker examines your followers based on their age, rate of activity and ratio of friends and followers, and applies Bayesian spam filtering algorithms to analyze a user’s Twitter stream.

Based on the analysis, it grades them with a score of A to F, where F being highly likely spammers and A being fine. You can unfollow and block users from the TweetBlocker dashboard.

In a summary, Tweetblocker is really a great tool for Twitters to safeguard their account from spammers.

Koobface, a computer worm started its journey on MySpcae and Facebook, and later it extended the journey to other social networking sites like MySpace, hi5. Now it has landed in Twitter to spread its wings.  It is spread through the YouTube-like link which generally comes with the text “my home video”. When user clicks on the link, the worm gets downloaded in the system.

When user logs into their Twitter account, the virus can automatically start tweeting out the malicious link. Twitter have specified about this malware on their service status update blog as “We are currently suspending all accounts that we detect sending such bogus tweets. If we suspend your account, we will send you an email notifying you of the suspension. This email also includes tips for removing the malware from your PC.”

Aware of the malware and secure your system from the threat.

Retweeting ensure effective link sharing for a web site or blog by creating great buzz and driving more traffic. At Social Media Camp 2009, Dan Zarrella of HubSpot gave a well-attended presentation on influence of retweets on social media optimization and link building.

DailyRT is a tweet aggregator that gathers the most popular tweets on twitter and displays them using scoring algorithm and numerous filters. In addition to tracking retweets in real-time, it also offers a number of advanced search functions that none of its competitors currently offer.

DailyRt offers search feature to enable you to search tweets based on keywords. The search criteria can be customized by users. Users have the ability to search for tweets with links, videos and/or images, and to specify a time span you would like to see tweets from. Also tweets can be filtered based on the number of followers.

Its advanced search function enables users to save a search query and use it later. This will be most useful if you are watching a certain topic constantly. You can also setup a good filter setup for an event in advance.

Twitter released an important new feature known as ‘calling card’ to selected developers. It is very similar to the fast growing “Face book Connect system” for logging into Face book around the web. First let’s see what is “face book connect”. With this feature, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, which includes: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, etc. Now Twitter also offering a similar feature to twits.

The sites using the ‘new Sign in with Twitter’ tool will go through a relatively simple process to gain permission to access your data from Twitter. If your browser is already logged in to Twitter, then they will either give you a pop-up window to log in there or they will skip directly to asking Twitter to ask you “whether you’d like to give access to this new site”. You can give them permission to access private messages like direct messages etc.