Twitter has filed a lawsuit against "five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers" in a federal court in San Francisco, in an effort to fight spam.

Twitter has 140 million active users and more than 340 million Tweets each day. As it reach expands, the service becomes a more attractive target for spammers.

Twitter decided to add another weapon to its arsenal: the law. The company on Thursday filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against "five of the most aggressive tool providers and spammers." Twitter said that by shutting down tool providers, it would prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, Twitter hopes that the suit will act as a deterrent to other spammers.

Besides the legal weapons, Twitter's engineering team continues to implement technical solutions that help the social networking site proactively reduce spam. For example, earlier this week, Twitter launched new anti-spam measures within Twitter to more aggressively suspend a new type of @ mention spam. Additionally, Twitter is now using its link shortener (t.co) to analyze whether a tweeted link leads to malware or malicious content.