Introduction
URL shortening services are online tools that take a long and complex URL and shorten it to a much shorter, more manageable length as shorter URLs are easier to remember, share, and type. However, URL shorteners can also be used maliciously by hackers to conceal the destination of a link and trick users into clicking on a malicious or phishing link. A study conducted by Cornell University found that out of 2.2 million URLs, 61% of the URLs used in phishing attacks were shortened links. But the risk is not onlylimited to hackers. Any cloud storage service and OneDrive in particular used to generate short URLs for documents and folders using the 1drv.ms domain. This is a “branded short domain” operated by Bitly and uses the same tokens as bit.ly. Searching by any cloud service domain (dropbox.com, drive.google.com), reveals a lot of downloadable files.
Search Tips
The search for URL shorteners can be a domain, brand or other information worth protecting. Please note that we have over 400 million URLs indexed here and more are added daily. Therefore, search terms with only a few letters or with very generic words will generate an incredible number of false positives. Please note that we limit the results to maximum 1000 URL's.
