The utility of tweeted URLs for web search

Kandylas, Vasileios; Dasdan, Ali

doi:10.1145/1772690.1772837

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…With the introduction of short URLs in OSM, a comparative study is necessary to be able to understand the level of acceptance of short URLs over long URLs. Kandylas et al performed a comparative study of long and short Bitly URLs propagation on Twitter and found that Bitly links received orders of magnitude more clicks than an equal random set of long URLs [5]. To further comprehend short URL distinctive characteristics, Antoniades et al studied the lifetime of short URLs which revealed that the life span of 50% short URLs exceeds 100 days.…”

Section: B Short Url Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In early 2013, a news article reported the spread of phishing attacks on Twitter through Direct Messages (DM) with malicious Bitly links. 5 Large number of users fell in the trap and clicked on the link, which redirected to a website that replicated Twitter's login page. Victims were then misled to believe that their session was expired and were made to login again, unknowingly revealing their Twitter credentials to the attacker.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

bit.ly/malicious: Deep dive into short URL based e-crime detection

Gupta

Aggarwal

Kumaraguru

2014

2014 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime)

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Abstract-Existence of spam URLs over emails and Online Social Media (OSM) has become a massive e-crime. To counter the dissemination of long complex URLs in emails and character limit imposed on various OSM (like Twitter), the concept of URL shortening has gained a lot of traction. URL shorteners take as input a long URL and output a short URL with the same landing page (as in the long URL) in return. With their immense popularity over time, URL shorteners have become a prime target for the attackers giving them an advantage to conceal malicious content. Bitly, a leading service among all shortening services is being exploited heavily to carry out phishing attacks, workfrom-home scams, pornographic content propagation, etc. This imposes additional performance pressure on Bitly and other URL shorteners to be able to detect and take a timely action against the illegitimate content. In this study, we analyzed a dataset of 763,160 short URLs marked suspicious by Bitly in the month of October 2013. Our results reveal that Bitly is not using its claimed spam detection services very effectively. We also show how a suspicious Bitly account goes unnoticed despite of a prolonged recurrent illegitimate activity. Bitly displays a warning page on identification of suspicious links, but we observed this approach to be weak in controlling the overall propagation of spam. We also identified some short URL based features and coupled them with two domain specific features to classify a Bitly URL as malicious or benign and achieved an accuracy of 86.41%. The feature set identified can be generalized to other URL shortening services as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first large scale study to highlight the issues with the implementation of Bitly's spam detection policies and proposing suitable countermeasures.

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Section: B Short Url Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

bit.ly/malicious: Deep dive into short URL based e-crime detection

Gupta

Aggarwal

Kumaraguru

2014

2014 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime)

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“…Klien and Strohmaier in [14], performed a geographical analysis of the short URLs from the qr.cx service. Kandylas et al [13] show that the quality of the landing pages pointed by bit.ly URLs extracted from Twitter is either very high (popular, reputable pages) or very low (spam and malicious pages).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stranger danger

Nikiforakis

Maggi

Stringhini

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web

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URL shortening services facilitate the need of exchanging long URLs using limited space, by creating compact URL aliases that redirect users to the original URLs when followed. Some of these services show advertisements (ads) to link-clicking users and pay a commission of their advertising earnings to link-shortening users.In this paper, we investigate the ecosystem of these increasingly popular ad-based URL shortening services. Even though traditional URL shortening services have been thoroughly investigated in previous research, we argue that, due to the monetary incentives and the presence of third-party advertising networks, ad-based URL shortening services and their users are exposed to more hazards than traditional shortening services. By analyzing the services themselves, the advertisers involved, and their users, we uncover a series of issues that are actively exploited by malicious advertisers and endanger the users. Moreover, next to documenting the ongoing abuse, we suggest a series of defense mechanisms that services and users can adopt to protect themselves.

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“…Kandylas and Dasdan discuss that search engine researchers are becoming more interested in adding Twitter posts to their search results [6]. The main problem with tweets is assessing quality.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A study of automation from seed URL generation to focused web archive development

Yang

Chitturi

Wilson

et al. 2012

Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

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In the event of emergencies and disasters, massive amounts of web resources are generated and shared. Due to the rapidly changing nature of those resources, it is important to start archiving them as soon as a disaster occurs. This led us to develop a prototype system for constructing archives with minimum human intervention using the seed URLs extracted from tweet collections. We present the details of our prototype system. We applied it to five tweet collections that had been developed in advance, for evaluation. We also identify five categories of non-relevant files and conclude with a discussion of findings from the evaluation.

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The utility of tweeted URLs for web search

Cited by 14 publications

References 6 publications

bit.ly/malicious: Deep dive into short URL based e-crime detection

bit.ly/malicious: Deep dive into short URL based e-crime detection

Stranger danger

A study of automation from seed URL generation to focused web archive development

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