Faking Twitter unfurling to phish you
Judging from the comments, some are <i>really</i> confused on what's happening here.<p>The real trick is that TwitterBot and you see different pages. For TwitterBot, which always clearly identifies itself (and some other signs like whether it is from Twitter's network infrastructure), the flow is t.co -> attacker.site -> legitimate.site, and so shows in the card (technically called unfurling) the details of the legitimate site, including the coveted legitimate domain name. For you, the attacker.site detects that you're <i>not</i> TwitterBot and do whatever phishing attempt they need to do. Of course, if you do check the domain name on your browser, it won't work... but let's be honest, that's just a fraction of people here, not even including the general public.<p>Others ask why TwitterBot does redirections, and it seems that everyone here forgot that marketers <i>love</i> their Bit.ly and Sprinklr links so much that Twitter needs to have a concession here (and no, you can't just whitelist them because some companies uses their own <i>different</i> shortlinks like t.co, fb.me, g.co, msft.it, redd.it, and youtu.be).<p>Why not just directly serve the redirection as seen by TwitterBot? Because a) marketers and analytics and b) because services like Branch (app.link) and Adjust <i>does</i> redirect users differently depending on their specific device (like Windows vs macOS vs Linux (or even a specific distro!) vs iOS vs Android).