Review: Finjan's SecureTwitter Keeps Users Safe (At Least On Firefox)

Although the company is best known for its secure Web gate solutions for the enterprise market, it has made SecureTwitter available as a free download for the public.

SecureTwitter is useful and worthy, but we ran into issues testing it.

SecureTwitter essentially is a feature of Finjan SecureBrowsing, a security extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox that has been around for a couple of years. SecureBrowsing/SecureTwitter scans and classifies Web addresses, providing a safety rating for URLs before a user actually clicks them.

Using this methodology, Finjan SecureTwitter provides a safety rating for a URL displayed in a browser. There are three ratings: Safe, Unsafe and Not Scanned. Because most of the malware tainting social networking sites consists of malicious URLs, it is an ideal solution for combating Twitter malware, as so many tweets contain embedded links.

However, the problem with this plug-in was that reviewers could not get it working in Internet Explorer 7.0.

First, system requirements were checked. Per Finjan's SecureBrowsing Web site, Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0 are supported as well as Windows XP SP 2. The plug-in was tested on supported software. Check.

But after installation, the Finjan toolbar was not visible. That was easily remedied by enabling the Finjan toolbar in "Manage Add-Ons" in Internet Explorer's settings.

After restarting the browser, Finjan SecureTwitter did no noticeable scanning activity and gave no ratings on any URLs. In Twitter, in Gmail, in fact, on any site tested, the software remained inactive.

Time for troubleshooting. Per Finjan support, IE had to be reset to all default security settings and default zones. Doing this still did not get the plug-in to work. If that method is the only way to get the product to work properly, it's potentially a real hassle for any IE user who has painstakingly customized the seemingly endless number of settings in Internet Explorer.

In contrast, SecureTwitter worked superbly in Firefox 3.0.11. The plug-in was installed and enabled in Firefox without any hiccups. Logging into Twitter, SecureTwitter analyzed and rated all embedded URLs in tweets displayed in the browser. It also did the analysis quickly.

While reviewers can't at this point recommend SecureTwitter for IE, it gets a good recommendation for users on Firefox.

SecureTwitter, for all its good intent, seems to be a way of repackaging SecureBrowsing. There does not seem to be any re-engineering of the product. Also, the Web site cited in Finjan's press release about SecureTwitter -- securebrowsing.finjan.com -- lists supported products as dated as Windows 2000 and Firefox 2.0. No mention of Firefox 3.0 or Windows Vista, for that matter.

If Finjan can work out the kinks with Internet Explorer and get the plug-in to work as effortlessly as it does in Firefox, it will be a valuable added layer of security for users on social networking sites.

In the meantime, at least it's free.