Our URI shortening service, Linking You, has been slowly increasing in usage since we launched it last year. We’ve now shortened over 2,500 URIs which have been visited over 80,000 times. As Linking You becomes further rooted into the University, and is used by increasingly more and more people we’ve decided that we ought to spend some time ensuring that our service is not being used for malicious purposes.
I’ve just implemented a new feature which will help protect you against malicious links shortened by Linking You. Every new URI shortened as of this evening is now checked against Google’s Safe Browsing service and SURBL’s URI reputation database.
In the interest of keeping the Internets working, URIs that are considered dangerous by either of the above services will still be shortened however when you visit the short link you’ll be presented with a warning message instead of being forwarded on.
In the coming weeks we’re going to require all users of the API to use an API key in order to prevent misuse.
Good plan. That will mean that I have to revisit a lot of code though…
Don’t worry, there will be at least a 6 week grace period
I have to say I am impressed at how forward thinking you are. I know a lot of people in industry that either
1. haven’t started shortening or, if they have,
2. don’t bother checking to see if the link is safe.
Long URL’s only have one advantage – they are human readable (except for some poorly written CMS ones). What you have done is ensure that they shortened ones are safe. Good work!