Short URLs the latest spam trend

The latest trend for spammers may not be botnets or faked domains. According to a new report from Symantec's MessageLabs, in the past week short URL spam has skyrocketed to account for 2% of all spam messages. While this may not seem like a big deal, short URL spam was virtually nonexistent just a month ago.

by Kristina Knight

The shortened URLs, which are served on a variety of domains, give spammers the ability to circumvent CAPTCHAs and registrations.

Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec said, "The newly shortened URLs also help cybercriminals disguise the true destination of where their victims will click through to, posing further risks of entering websites used to conducting drive-by malware attacks as well as spam. Donbot, the botnet responsible for sending approximately five billion spam messages every day, is one of the main culprits for using this technique. Links of any size all need to be treated with caution."

Why shorten URLs? Because many social networks and even some email programs do not allow long website addresses. So, spammers have turned to using URL shortening services to get around the social net and email rules.

Since April, there have been a few blips when spammers began using shortened URLs. In May, shortened URL spam reached about 0.5%, but then beginning the week of June 28, shortened URLs skyrocketed to 2.5% of spam messages and has remained at a high level.

Tags: botnets, email, email marketing, MessageLabs, shortened URLs, spam threats, spammers