Spike in email spam with shortened URLs

Email security provider MessageLabs has issued a warning of a dramatic spike in the number of spam emails that include shortened web addresses. These truncated URLs, provided by the likes of tinyurl or bit.ly, are extremely popular on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where character length limitations or aesthetic concerns fuel their usage.

Matt Sergeant, a senior antispam technologist at MessageLabs says, "Usually when we see a spike of this nature it tends to indicate that a spammer has found some method of automating the creation of these short URLs."

At least one major bot is known to be aggressively using shortened URLs to redirect websurfers to locations they would not usually visit. At the moment, the primary focus seems to be on displaying advertisements, but there is really nothing to stop attempts to link to sites hosting malware too.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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