URL shorteners experience surge of popularity among spammers
More than 2.2% of spam contains shortened URLs.
URL shortening services have proven recently to be popular not just among
microbloggers in need of shorter URLs, but also among spammers attempting to disguise
the websites they are spamming.
According to email filtering service MessageLabs, well over 2
per cent of current spam contains a shortened URL.
URL shorteners such as tinyurl.com and bit.ly have
been around for over a decade but have become very popular recently
among users of microblogging sites such as Twitter (which restrict users' entries to a maxiumum number of characters - 140 in the case of Twitter).
Because most of these services are
free and require neither registration nor CAPTCHA solving, they can be used to
automatically generate innocent-looking URLs that redirect to websites
containing malware and/or spamvertised products. While it is possible
for spam filters to follow the URLs,
this requires significantly more resources than being able to
look up the URL against an existing blacklist. Furthermore,
end-users are more likely to click on such links because their malicious or otherwise questionable nature is disguised in
the shortening process.
End-users are advised to exercise caution when clicking on any
shortened URLs, while the URL shortening services face a tough task in
finding a way to prevent their systems from being abused by spammers.
09 July 2009
Tags:
blogging, messagelabs, spam, url.
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1 comment
It is the second entry I read tonight. And I am on my third. Got to think which one is next. Thank you.
by Black Hairstyles, 27 August 2010, 23:43
