Using URL shorteners could expose you to privacy invasions and malware attacks
Apr15
on April 15, 2016
at 8:57 am
URL shorteners are great for packaging links that you want to share on blogs, social networks and messaging services. Unfortunately, they can pose grave security risks, as two researchers discovered in a study spanning 18 months (PDF). Vitaly Shmatikov of Cornell Tech, in collaboration with visiting researcher Martin Georgiev, looked at the URL shortening methods used by Microsoft in its OneDrive cloud storage app, as well Google in its Maps service. What they found was pretty damn scary. They noted that Microsoft used Bitly’s service to generate short URLs linking to users’ OneDrive files and they had a predictable structure.…
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