Two years of short URLs internet measurement: security threats and countermeasures

@InProceedings{	  maggi_longshore_2013,
  abstract	= {URL shortening services have become extremely popular.
		  However, it is still unclear whether they are an effective
		  and reliable tool that can be leveraged to hide malicious
		  URLs, and to what extent these abuses can impact the end
		  users. With these questions in mind, we first analyzed
		  existing countermeasures adopted by popular shortening
		  services. Surprisingly, we found such countermeasures to be
		  ineffective and trivial to bypass. This first measurement
		  motivated us to proceed further with a large-scale
		  collection of the HTTP interactions that originate when web
		  users access live pages that contain short URLs. To this
		  end, we monitored 622 distinct URL shortening services
		  between March 2010 and April 2012, and collected 24,953,881
		  distinct short URLs. With this large dataset, we studied
		  the abuse of short URLs. Despite short URLs are a
		  significant, new security risk, in accordance with the
		  reports resulting from the observation of the overall
		  phishing and spamming activity, we found that only a
		  relatively small fraction of users ever encountered
		  malicious short URLs. Interestingly, during the second year
		  of measurement, we noticed an increased percentage of short
		  URLs being abused for drive-by download campaigns and a
		  decreased percentage of short URLs being abused for spam
		  campaigns. In addition to these security-related findings,
		  our unique monitoring infrastructure and large dataset
		  allowed us to complement previous research on short URLs
		  and analyze these web services from the user's
		  perspective.},
  author	= {Maggi, Federico and Frossi, Alessandro and Zanero, Stefano
		  and Stringhini, Gianluca and Stone-Gross, Brett and
		  Kruegel, Christopher and Vigna, Giovanni},
  booktitle	= {Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World
		  Wide Web (WWW)},
  date		= {2013-05},
  file		= {files/papers/conference-papers/maggi_longshore_2013.pdf},
  isbn		= {978-1-4503-2035-1},
  location	= {Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland},
  pages		= {861--872},
  publisher	= {International World Wide Web Conferences Steering
		  Committee},
  shorttitle	= {LongShore},
  title		= {Two years of short URLs internet measurement: security
		  threats and countermeasures}
}