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Spammers Establish Fake URL-Shortening Services

Posted by timothy on from the services-seems-a-strong-word dept.

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."

9 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Good news, no? by greichert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Good news, no? by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or am I missing something?

      What we're all missing is the list of these fake URL-shortening sites. Neither the article or the full PDF listed them.

  2. It was to be expcted by Pegasus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 :)

    1. Re:It was to be expcted by erikdalen · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Erik Dalén
    2. Re:It was to be expcted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      The opposite of a woofer. Or if you remember Beavis and Butthead... it's the name for the genitalia of a praying mantis. :)

    3. Re:It was to be expcted by kyrio · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  3. call me overly paranoid, but... by thomasdz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. TinyURL by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can mitigate this on TinyURL by using this.

    1. Re:TinyURL by freedumb2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That should really be the default setting.