Shortern URL threat to your financials
31 December 2009
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URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web where a provider makes a web page available under a very short URL in addition to the original address. For example, the page http://www.marketcalls.in/2009/12/investment-picks-for-year-2010.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+MarketCalls2009+(Market+Calls) can be shortened to http://goo.gl/fb/SjhO
Recently the URL shortening service is getting more popular due to twitter explosion.Few popular url services are
these are the popular url shortening services that help take longer URLs (which can be over a hundred characters long) and transform them into manageable links that almost never exceed 20 characters. URL shorteners are not new – TinyURL has been around since 2002. But their popularity has skyrocketed with the twitter explosion, which only allows for 140 characters in any message.Bloggers, Twitter users and many social networking site users often utilize URL shorteners to provide short worded links that redirect to links which are actually longer in length
The most obvious problem is that shortened URLs could lead anywhere — a spam site, a phishing site, a porn site, a malware site, who knows? More over shortern URL’s can track and compile click data. One of the reasons that bit.ly has received so much attention lately is because of the comprehensive data Bitly provides in the form of live click data, geographic location, the webpage the link where the link was clicked, and more. Such info could be a potential threat to the clicker.
If the URL shortener gets hacked then every link becomes a potential phishing attack. The clicker can’t even tell by hovering where a link will take them, which is bad form.
There are few solutions to solve these kinds of problems. There are few URL expander serices like http://www.clybs.com/urlexpander . It expands shortened URLs to their original long URL and determine if a site is suspected of malware, phishing , and/or porn content.. The URL Expander Tool also tracks the path it took before arriving at the original expanded URL.
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Not bad, but you have to go to that web site for each and every URL.
Check out my bookmarklet/widget that automatically expands all shortened URLs on a page, allowing you to SEE the original links instead of the shortened URLs.
http://urlsniffer.info
It can run on almost any web page and there’s nothing to download.
Just bookmark the bookmarklet and off you go.
There is an interactive demo on the home page.
Leave your response!