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Spammers Establish Fake URL-Shortening Services
Orome1 writes "Spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec. This new spamming activity has contributed to this month's increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March. Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's own Web site."
I've never trusted ANY of the URL shortening services. in this age of cut-and-paste, for the most part (except for twitter) *I* really don't see the need for them. (note, I said "*I* don't see any need for them...it's an opinion...don't flame me for an opinion) :-)
I've been goatse.cx-ed on Slashdot too many times, I guess!
when I see a short URL (even those short valid ones from Reddit's imgur.com), red flags go off in my brain. (yeah that hurts)
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
The problem is that nearly every computer user clicks on random links. The people who actually know how to use a computer are a very small amount of the total computer users.