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Evolution of Phishing Attacks: Challenges and Opportunities for Humans to Adapt to the Ubiquitous Connected World
Published in Mustapha Mouloua, Peter A. Hancock, James Ferraro, Human Performance in Automated and Autonomous Systems, 2019
Aiping Xiong, Robert W. Proctor, Ninghui Li
URL shortening is a technique on the Internet that helps users share links more easily by shortening and modifying them. For example, if one enters a URL into the website bitly.com, it will generate a URL that begins with bit.ly and is followed by a short character string that is unrelated to the original URL but linked to it. Although this service is useful for people to share URLs within mobile platforms in which there are character limitations (e.g., Twitter), phishers also seize such opportunity and use these URL shortening services to mask phishing URLs so that the victims cannot determine the legitimacy of the URL (e.g., NYU IT Security, 2018). A recent work examined over 7,000 phishing short URLs in the years of 2016 and 2017 (Le Page, Jourdan, Bochmann, Flood, & Onut, 2018). It found that the short URLs had high click-through rates during an active time span on the order of hours, and the use of short URLs increased in social media platforms.
Additional Challenges Presented by Web Resources
Published in Marsha Ann Tate, Web Wisdom, 2018
As the Yahoo example above demonstrates, dynamic URLs can be extremely long and unwieldy, especially if the URL needs to be cited in a paper or publication. URL shortening services such as TinyURL can be used to shrink long URLs. However, since the services utilize a form of redirection, they pose potential security and privacy risks. For example, third parties can create TinyURLs to divert users to malicious sites (Storm 2018; Beal 2018-b). There are other perils associated with the services as well. For instance, URL shortening services may periodically go offline or even permanently shut down, creating intermittent or continuously broken links. Also, shortened URLS may be blocked by internet service providers or websites. Therefore, it is important to keep these various considerations in mind before shortening URLs (Beal 2016).
Spams classification and their diffusibility prediction on Twitter through sentiment and topic models
Published in International Journal of Computers and Applications, 2022
URLs are not added to tweets in their original form as they contain many characters. There exist various URL shortening services like Bit.ly and Twitter URL shortener which transform original URLs to a short form. These services provide more space to twitter users to accommodate additional information in their tweets. Shortening of URLs is helpful in better utilization of tweets’ length, but at the same time it increases the complexity of spam detection by obfuscating malicious links. So, to utilize the lexical characteristics of original URLs one has to reverse engineer the shortened URLs to their original forms. According to Thomas et al. [23], filtering of URLs is a very expensive process and it may incur a cost of $22,751 for filtering 15.3 M URLs/day for a month. Apart from the cost issue, these methods also fall short in detecting malicious URLs having conditional behaviors [24]. Conditional behavior enables the spammers to redirect investigators to legitimate webpages and normal users to spam links.