A patent that was recently granted to Twitter reveals how the social media giant plans to block mobile malware from affecting its users.
Filed in 2012, the patent shares how Twitter users would be alerted of malware that crawls websites through an “emulated mobile device” which acts as a bot and scans mobile sites' behaviors, which “are stored [and] classified as hard or soft signals,” according to the filing.
That information would be used to assess “probability” that a mobile site is malicious, and it would be classified accordingly as “malicious or non-malicious.” Users, site administrators and developers are then alerted to the site's classification.
The patent is similar to a system already used by Google in Chrome and on Google.com, according to VentureBeat, which, based on its own tests, believes the on the Twitter technology has not yet been put to use.