Hidden Threats under URL Shortening Services !

MacAfee Launches its URL Shortening Service

AppAppeal was ranked 1st amongst the popular URL shorteners . The list includes popular shorteners like TinyURL ,Bit.ly, Goo.gl, is.gd & OW.ly. However  on the other hand, these URL shorteners hide a large number of malicious URLs.
According to reports,MaAfee Labs have discovered the following results :

However apart from these services there are many more URL shortening services available on the internet. Domains requested for URL shortening are COM,LY,ME,US,TO,NET,GD & CC. However 2/3rd of these sites lead to advertising web pages or webpages show that their domain names have been put for sale. Moreover,these services require registrations,; but most of them are found to be directly usable. According to reports, URLs which were most hit by malwares in the recent past are:

• goo.gl
• bit.ly
• is.gd
• tinyurl.com
• ow.ly
• y.ahoo.it
• tiny.cc
• 0845.com
• jmb.tw

MaAfee has now released it own URL shorteners for Internet users. This service uses the domain mcaf.ee. It checks and confirms if the site is malicious &  if it is secure for the users, mcaf.ee short URLs add a frame to the top of the destination page thus confirming if has good ranking from Site Advisory.

However if the URL is malicious the user will be stopped !

This services can be added as an add-on for Google Chrome and as a extension for Firefox.

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