Two month ago I read about the DNC mail account hack - which was probably the reason for the surprising lose of Hillary Clinton. I was really fascinated, about the fact that one hacked mail account could have such a big extent on the election.
But obviously, not only the big extent of the hack is interesting, also the technique this hack was achieved. Due the public release from thousands of DNC mails, some security journalists found out, that the mail account was hacked on astonishing easy way:
in the form a URL shortened by the Bit.ly service.
According to sophos.com the hackers sent a bit.ly link which was linked to a phishing site. These short-links are often used by hackers to hide the original URL of a malicious site. Unexperienced users, who aren’t familiar with short-links, often don’t know about this potential risk.
Despite this risk, short-links can be handy too, they can shrink a long URL to short one, so you can share it easily. Short-links offer also the opportunity to gain deep insight into your link audience, therefore short-links are often used by companies for advertisement campaigns. So, as you see they can be really useful too.
To eliminate the disadvantage of malicious short-links I developed the first safe short-link generator: safely.link. Safely.link scans every link with the Google Safe-Browsing API before redirecting the user. With this technology you can enjoy all advantages of short-links without be “threatened” by malware. And differently to many other short link generators, Safely.link provides lots of other cool functions, for example: a password protection for your links, statistics about your visitors, etc.
Check out the first safe short link generator: safely.link !
