Short links - what are they, and how should we handle them?
What are they?
If I go to the NAB website, I can navigate through their menu until I come to the ‘NAB Qantas Business Signature Card’ page.
And the address bar at the top of the browser shows this web address:
https://www.nab.com.au/business/business-credit-cards/nab-qantas-business-signature-card
Now that’s a pretty long link! If NAB wanted to do some marketing and get people to this page, it would be pretty annoying to send this out in text messages or put in brochures.
So, there’s this thing called a ‘Short link’. Essentially you can take the long link above, and a new shorter link is created, that will ultimately take you to the same web page.
There are plenty of ways of making short links. Many people have heard of the website bit.ly, which is used to create short links. And social media will often instantly turn long links into short links too, to keep things neat and tidy.
If I take the above link to the bit.ly website, it turns it into this for me:
Much shorter!
So what’s the problem?
Hover on the long link, and you can see where it takes you.
Hover on the short link, and it only repeats the link text that you can see before hovering.
So, the problem is you don’t know where you are going to go when you click on that short link!
And that’s why cyber criminals will use them. You might hover, it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful, and you click, and end up on a criminal’s webpage where they try to hack you, or trick you out of your money or log in details etc.
What can we do?
Unshorten them! Whenever you see a short link that looks like the above (i.e. a short collection of random letters and numbers), check out the hover (as you should always do anyway). If the hover is the same as the link text, then there’s a good chance it’s a short link.
So right click on it, copy the link address (you’re essentially copying the destination). Then go to a website like:
Paste in the copied destination, click ‘Expand’, and check out the results for the long link. Is it taking you where you expect?
Now is everyone going to do this? Realistically probably not. So if you’re going to click on short links without checking first, at least look at your browser address bar as the page loads, and make sure you end up where you expected.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
