Shortened URLs: The good the bad, and the ugly

Millions of people and companies have old machines that they are still using.  Windows XP has been end-of-lifed for years, as has Windows 7 and Windows Vista, yet I still see people with these operating systems connecting to the internet.

Old computers, as well as old software and operating systems pose a threat to other users of the internet for a number of reasons.

Out of date software may give hackers a nice welcoming mat yo enter into your machine and take control, or steal your personal information.  It is very important that you update your software as many times the updates are to correct security flaws in the prior versions.

Many people know that flash has been deprecated (no longer considered state of the art) but how many people have deleted flash from their machines?  To be truly safe, you need to remove flash if you are not using it (because if it is there, the hackers will gladly use it instead.)

The same thing applies for older versions of Java.  Once you update your java, you should check your installed programs to make sure you are not running different versions.  Just like flash and Windows, older versions have many vulnerabilities that were not fixed, and make you a tasty target.

If you are not sure about the security of your computer systems, please contact me to schedule a security assessment.

By now, everyone knows that a URL is basically an internet address.  There are many different examples of URLs like:

  • http://helpmeclayton.com
  • ftp://mozilla.org
  • mailto://help@claytonrandall.com
  • https://aol.com

each one shows you where your destination you will get to when you click on them.  When Twitter came along and had a 140 character limit, people turned to URL shortening to be able to send links of pages where the URL was too long.  People also got tired of typing in extremely long URLs and started using the shorteners to send to friends.  Then the scammers took notice that people would click on URLs that made no sense, so they started using them to send out URLs for sites people would never click on if they were revealed.

SO WHAT SHOULD I DO?

There are services now that you can copy a shortened URL into it, and it will tell you where it is going.  like

You should use one of these sites to verify if you feel a shortened URL might sound fishy.