Evildoing Spammers Discover TinyURL and Other URL-Shorteners

by Lee Bains on July 9, 2009 at 06:24 AM

Twitter is no stranger to spam, so it shouldn't be of any great surprise that spammers are hitting one of tweeters' favorite utilities. According to the New York Times' Bits blog, URL-shortening services like TinyURL and Bit.ly have unintentionally provided spammers with a veil to cover the ugly face of their shady activities.

By copy-and-pasting a Web address (a.k.a. URL) into one of these services, a user is presented with another, much shorter alias URL. These content-rich, character-light URLs have gained in popularity as more and more people join Twitter, which only allows 140 characters per tweet.

Now, however, spammers are having a field day using these same shortened URLs in e-mail spam, because the actual destinations of these mini-links aren't apparent from just looking at the URLs themselves -- they all contain only 'tinyURL' or 'Bit.ly' plus a letter/number code. Twitter users have become so accustomed to indiscriminately clicking on these shortened addresses, and it looks as though the same is true of folks who actually open their e-mail spam. According to the Times, spam authority MessageLabs reported yesterday that a full 2-percent of spam e-mails had come to include these shortened URLs -- just over a few days. Obviously spam recipients are clicking on them or the growth wouldn't be so rapid. Because this trend is recently emerging, few, if any, preventative measures seem to have been taken.

MessageLabs' Matt Sergeant told PC Mag that his company has found these malicious links to be showing up in e-mails. (Their prevalence on Twitter has not yet been studied.) Apparently, one of these malicious e-mails is likely to feature brief, grammatically incorrect messages along with one of the shortened URLs. While Sergeant says that some of the links will automatically download malicious content to your computer, most will just direct you to the usual "Free Penis Enlargement!" and "Lose 60 Pounds in Three Days!" product pages.

The most worrisome aspect of this trend is the fact that an honest link is indecipherable from a dishonest one. Call us paranoid, but we won't be clicking on any of those itty-bitty links we see in any e-mails or text messages for now. Let's just hope that these services can address the problem promptly and adequately. [From: New York Times]

Tags: bitly, e-mail, email, security, spam, tinyurl, top, twitter, url shortening, UrlShortening

Comments

skuzzboomerJul 9th 2009 10:21AM

Neutral

Wow... anyone who has been anywhere on the internet should've already known about this a long time ago.

I started ignoring those links about a year and a half ago. Smart move - as some have been reported to contain viruses, CP, etc... Dangerous stuff.

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jonJul 9th 2009 11:03AM

Neutral

Wow... This is old news to anyone who has used the internet at all in the last 2 years.

I never click on 'hidden' links. Good idea; as it turns out, many of the links are to virus-infested websites, CP (disturbing and VERY illegal- even accidental wandering onto a site with it could merit a lot of jail time), and a ton of other crap nobody wants to get or see (goatse, anyone?)...

Just be smart about browsing; it's not that difficult to realize whats real and whats not.

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