Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
@spam: the underground on 140 characters or less
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web
Phi.sh/$oCiaL: the phishing landscape through short URLs
Proceedings of the 8th Annual Collaboration, Electronic messaging, Anti-Abuse and Spam Conference
Great east Japan earthquake viewed from a URL shortener
Proceedings of the Special Workshop on Internet and Disasters
Two years of short URLs internet measurement: security threats and countermeasures
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
Stranger danger: exploring the ecosystem of ad-based URL shortening services
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
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URL shortener services today have come to play an important role in our social media landscape. They direct user attention and disseminate information in online social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Shortener services typically provide short URLs in exchange for long URLs. These short URLs can then be shared and diffused by users via online social media, e-mail or other forms of electronic communication. When another user clicks on the shortened URL, she will be redirected to the underlying long URL. Shortened URLs can serve many legitimate purposes, such as click tracking, but can also serve illicit behavior such as fraud, deceit and spam. Although usage of URL shortener services today is ubiquituous, our research community knows little about how exactly these services are used and what purposes they serve. In this paper, we study usage logs of a URL shortener service that has been operated by our group for more than a year. We expose the extent of spamming taking place in our logs, and provide first insights into the planetary-scale of this problem. Our results are relevant for researchers and engineers interested in understanding the emerging phenomenon and dangers of spamming via URL shortener services.