The microblogging site Twitter continues to grow at a massive pace, with more than 140 million active users who post over 340 million tweets each day, amounting to north of a billion every three days. Due to this tremendous growth, the site has become a very attractive vehicle for spammers and cybercriminals to deliver their malicious content.

To combat this, Twitter has now filed a lawsuit in a federal US court in San Francisco against five malicious tool providers and spammers. Via this legal action the company says it will be “going straight to the source” to counteract the spamming problem.

“By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter,” the firm posted on its official blog.

Previous moves by the company to counteract spammers and the spread of malware include the acquisition of web security company Dasient. Dasient specialises in solving web-scale security problems dealing with malware and other kinds of online abuse. The company launched a web anti-malware platform that can scan URLs and websites for harmful content in 2009 and followed this up with the release of an anti-malvertising service in 2010, to protect ad networks as well as publishers from malicious ads.

In related news, Twitter also recently announced its acquisition of blogging and sharing site Posterous, whilst the firm’s co-founders revealed the details behind their latest internet project dubbed Branch, which aims to establish a “new platform for dialogue on the web”.