Sophos and bit.ly – making short links safer

Here’s some good news if you’re one of the millions of people who have come to depend upon shortened urls in your day-to-day life.

bit.ly, isn’t just the default link shortening service used by Twitter, it’s also widely used on other social networking sites and communications as a handy way to shorten a link.

For instance, bit.ly will convert a link such as:

http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/11/bit.ly-agreement.html

to the much more manageable:

http://bit.ly/8JYaoV

Today, bit.ly announced that it was partnering with Sophos (and our friends at Verisign and WebSense) to offer additional protection to users clicking on short bit.ly links to defend against the possibility of them visiting a webpage created by spammers or phishers, or infected with malware…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.