URL shortening is when you use a service such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com to take a very long URL and condense it into a very short URL. This is very useful for when you need a short URLs, when you have to read a URL over the phone, or for a .pdf document.\u00a0 Below is an example using the URL for this blog entry:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/?p=445&preview=true<\/a><\/p>\n into this shortened URL:<\/p>\n https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/y8ykvwz5<\/a><\/p>\n The security risk with a shortened URL is you cannot tell where you are going when you click the link, you have to trust the sender. As a result, some organisations teach their employees not to trust shortened URLs, or simply block them at their network gateway. This poses a problem for some areas of the University.<\/p>\n You should not trust any shortened URLs in an unsolicited email that use a public URL shortener.<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time we have to respect the security risks that come along with that. The solution is preview mode. By prepending ‘preview’ to a TinyURL, the service does not send you directly to the destination website. Instead you are taken to a landing page that gives preview of where you will ultimately go.\u00a0 However preview mode does not work on all devices, it mainly applies to PCs.<\/p>\n Here is the short URL pointing to this blog article with preview:<\/p>\n https:\/\/preview.tinyurl.com\/y8ykvwz5<\/a><\/p>\n As long as we can trust the URL shortening service, preview mode eliminates many of the risks associated with URL shortening.<\/p>\n Until the University is able to offer its own URL shortening service, we recommend TinyURL, the only one that seems to offer the preview facility.\u00a0 Go to:<\/p>\n https:\/\/tinyurl.com<\/a><\/p>\n for more information. We don’t recommend TinyURL but it is preferable to others that do not have the preview facility.<\/p>\n Short URLs should not be used in email.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" URL shortening is when you use a service such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com to take a very long URL and condense it into a very short URL. This is very useful for when you need a short URLs, when you have to read a URL over the phone, or for a .pdf document.\u00a0 Below is … Continue reading “URL Shorteners”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/itsecurity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}