Twitter contains 21% of active users only

A new study by Barracuda Labs tells that there are only 21% accounts are active.
Barracuda labs studied more than 19 million twitter users and reported that there are only 21% true accounts running in twitter. Read some of the key highlights posted at barracuda Networks.com.

Key highlights from the report include:

• Only 21 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users1.
• Overall, users are becoming more active on Twitter.
• 49 percent of Twitter users, and 48 of the top 100 most followed Twitter users, joined during the Twitter Red Carpet Era2, indicating the significant impact celebrities have on the social networking landscape as they bring their real-world fans over to Twitter.
• The Twitter growth rate spiked at 21.17 percent in April 2009 due to the Twitter Red Carpet Era.
• During the Twitter Red Carpet Era, the Twitter Crime Rate3 increased 66 percent, and continued to escalate reaching 12 percent in October 2009, indicating one in eight accounts created was deemed to be malicious, suspicious or otherwise misused and subsequently suspended.

“Attackers continue to be as opportunistic as ever.  As soon as the Twitter user base and activity levels increased, hackers were prepared with novel attacks to compromise users,” said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer at Barracuda Networks.  “As social networking, and specifically Twitter, becomes more ingrained in everyday business, it is crucial to understand the nature of attacks happening on these sites, as well as how users and networks can be compromised.”

The report also provides email and Web security insights that include:

• Email-borne malware increased by threefold in the second half of 2009.
• Jewelry spam grew by tenfold during the year mirroring the rising price of gold
• Web exploit kits, rogue anti-virus and search result poisoning were the most popular classes of Web attacks.

Read the full study details @ http://blog.barracuda.com/wordpress/