Twitter's Twail of Twouble

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Don't be fooled by all the cutesy-pie lingo that comes with Twitter. There are increasingly more twicks sprinkled in with those tweets.

It's a sure sign of success, I suppose, that a service has "arrived" online when it becomes one of the new preferred carriers of choice for worms, scams and spam.

Here are some of the key areas of vulnerability:

1. Old fashioned hacks into accounts: It's even happened to the President.

2. Phishing scams. Twitter is, of course, fertile ground for phishing scams just by the nature of how it works.

3. Worms. The Twitter worm that has received the most attention was this year's Mikeyy worm. There have been others.

4. Tiny urls. It's not easy putting your thoughts into 140 characters, especially when you have a link taking up 130 of those characters. Welcome the era of the tiny url, subsequently. This is also a great vulnerability. There are a number of plug-ins and apps you can use to test those links before you actually click through. Do so. Check out Zone Deck, Firefox's Bit.ly preview plug-in, Tweetie and Tweetdeck, as well.

5. You. Yes, you. It's so easy to tweet off at the mouth and not think about where those 140 characters are going and who will see them and, perhaps, exploit them. Be careful about giving out too much information about yourself; your comings and goings, your personal life, where you live, phone numbers, etc.

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio