AVG Launches New Feature That Scans Shortened URLs

AVG Technologies, the company behind the very popular anti-virus scanning software has launched a new feature. This new feature is extremely handy for those who are active on Twitter. Twitter messages often contain short URLs, but it is unpredictable which ones have links to viruses and which ones don’t.

AVG’s LinkScanner scans websites as you browse them to make sure that malway is not contained in them. If there is malware, the Internet user is blocked from revisiting the website. Twitter themselves use the Google Safe Browsing API to check websites that Google has blacklisted to make sure that there aren’t any short URLs connected to them. Twitter deletes the post immediately after detecting the malware-contained short URL.

AVG’s LinkScanner service track the malware websites in real-time. Short URLs are scanned by LinkScanner which can find bad links within GMail, Digg, MySpace and Bebo.

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