Your Users Still Fall For Phishing Attacks Because of URL Shorteners

Analysis of current phishing attacks by security researchers have uncovered an increase in the use of trusted shortlink services.

To be successful, phishing scammers need to establish legitimacy as much and as early as possible.

Brand impersonation within an email has long been one method, but to establish legitimacy to security solutions, scammers have had to do more than just have a look-alike domain. 

According to security researchers at Barracuda, a wave of phishing attacks is leveraging legitimate URL shortening services to add a layer of obfuscation to their malicious links in emails. 

While some security solutions actually follow links to – and analyze – their final destination, many solutions simply look at the link itself. By using a shortlink – like those created by bit.ly that look similar to “bit[dot]ly[slash]FakeURL”, solutions that take the link at face value will see it as legitimate.

Barracuda theorizes that threat actors are compromising credentials at these shortlink services to gain access and utilize them as part of phishing attacks.

There’s really only two ways to counteract this:

1. Employ security software solutions that traverse links and scan final web destinations for malicious content
2. Teach users through continual new-school security awareness training to be vigilant each and every time they interact with an email, at attachment, or a web link, not trusting the content or context in front of them and choosing to scrutinize before proceeding.

And because cybercriminals will continue to evolve their methods, both of these should be put and kept in place.

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