New Spam Trick: Shortened Urls

[Peaches]

New Spam Trick: Shortened URLs

Joan Goodchild, CSO

Sunday, July 12, 2009 9:45 AM PDT

Shortened URLs, a service on many sites that turns lengthy Web addresses into shorter URLs, is rapidly becoming a popular way for spammers to reach unsuspecting readers. New analysis from Symantec's MessageLabs finds shortened URLs now account for 2 percent of all spam in inboxes (See also: Spam is More Malicious than Ever).

The presence of shortened URLs in spam has skyrocketed just in the last few weeks, according to Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs.

"We've been monitoring the use of short URLs in regular email spam for the past few months and noticed that it had been used in small spam campaigns. However, in the middle of last week, we saw it increase exponentially, said Sergeant. "It went from practically nothing to 2.23 percent of total spam today (July 8th)."

The technique has picked up speed because the emails are being sent by the Donbot botnet, said Sergeant. The spike indicates that the botnet owner or operator has found a way to automate the creation of short URL links, within the botnet code or the templates that they send out, he said.

pcworld - http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/arti...tened_urls.html