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."

Comments

Good news, no?

[greichert]

So if you block the fake URL-shortening domain with an "ad-blocker" or at the browser level (à la Google Chrome), you avoid pretty simply the redirection to the spam side, without having to block the legitimate URL-shortening sites. Or am I missing something?

It was to be expcted

[Pegasus]

I always found url shortening to be a weird and potentially dangerous practice. Trading some comfort to squeeze your link into a tweet for the comfort to actually predict where this link will take you? No thanks. If url does not fit into a tweet, then it's a tweeter problem that tweeter should fix. That's also why I don't use tweeter. I find IRC superior :)

Re:It was to be expcted

[erikdalen]

I've seen URL shortening used in print magazines for quite a long time as well though. Where it makes sense as you have to type the URL by hand to visit it. So Twitter isn't the only use case.