Symantec has released the July 2010 MessageLabs Intelligence Report which contains the usual interesting and relevant facts regarding trends in spam and malware. Of particular interest in this report, though, is the fact that attacks exploiting shortened URLs have skyrocketed, and that a new approach is needed to protect against the rising threat.
A Symantec spokesperson clarified the shortened URL issue in an e-mail, stating that the MessageLab report "reveals that the percentage of spam using shortened URLs has increased in the last year, from 9.3% to 18% of all spam at its peak. The average volume of spam containing shortened URLs has also increased, with this type of spam appearing in more 0.5% of spam on 43 days in the past four months."

Sending URLs in email or instant messaging communications has always been problematic. Some URLs are excessively long--resulting in a bunch of gibberish in the message, and end up broken--rendering them useless for the recipient anyway unless the user wants to manually copy and paste or type in the part of the URL that got cut off.

The link for this article located at IT World is no longer available.