Hackers Create their Own URL Shortening Service

Date: 2011-07-05 16:44:09

According to Symantec's May message labs report, For the First Time, Spammers established their own fake URL-shortening services. These services first use a commercial shortener to then link to their own shortener which finally points to a malicious site.

According to Symantec, once the user has arrived at the site, they will be bombarded with attacks probing for vulnerabilities.

We did a short experiment to see how bit.ly would react to a tinyurl. Bit.ly handled it well. Although, we suppose that an unknown URL shortner may not invoke a warning as our test did.

1. We used TinyUrl.com to create http://tinyurl.com/3bzuc8v from http://www.healthypasswords.com/

2. We then used bit.ly to create http://bit.ly/qSQEk1 from the tinyurl url.

3. We tried the second short url, which issued the following warning from bit.ly

Category: Internet

Subcategory: Phishing