4 ms·
How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?
by zackattack 15y ago
How do spammers successfully abuse shorteners?
- tlrobinson 15y agoI don't know what the parent commenter had in mind, but perhaps bad spam filters don't follow redirects and bad link filters don't filter certain TLDs?
- vog 15y agoWhy would a link filter want to filter whole TLDs? Shouldn't this be based at least on the domain name rather than discriminating whole countries by blocking their TLDs?
- tlrobinson 15y agoI don't know. I could imagine really stupid spam filters looking for strings matching /http:\/\/.*\.(com|net|org)/ or something. Of course that's no one else's fault but the filter.
- astrange 15y agoMost anything that filters out spam domains doesn't follow shortener links to them. Web forum spam is full of shortener links. Stop making shorteners.
- balac 15y agoObfuscating spam links. It is much harder to tell a fake/crappy url when it is hidden through a shortening service.
- dgl 15y agoLike other comments have said spammers use it as a form of obfuscation. They even chain URL shorteners to obfuscate things even more. I work for an anti-spam company. We see a constant stream of spammy short URLs -- peaking at tens of new unique links per second.