See also: https://danluu.com/diseconomies-scale/
I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#52I've dealt with some spammers to various degrees. I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to - "shadowban" them. Allow them to use your service, but don't indicate to them that you've identified them as malicious. For instance, when dealing with chat spammers - allow them to chat, but do not show their chats to other users. Another level would be to allow them to chat, but only show their c…
> if the ip address that created the link shortener accesses the link, they get the real redirect, and if a different ip address accesses it If there’s anything I have learned about IP based blocking, it’s very unreliable. Especially in a NAT’d world. Great you “shadowbanned” an IP, but you also impacted many other people and devices behind that public IP including the bad actor. IPv6 is supposed to make NAT irreleva…
Is IPv4 actually deprecated?
And IMHO, NAT won the fight against IPv6 because it’s backward compatible.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#53I've dealt with some spammers to various degrees. I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to - "shadowban" them. Allow them to use your service, but don't indicate to them that you've identified them as malicious. For instance, when dealing with chat spammers - allow them to chat, but do not show their chats to other users. Another level would be to allow them to chat, but only show their c…
> if the ip address that created the link shortener accesses the link, they get the real redirect, and if a different ip address accesses it If there’s anything I have learned about IP based blocking, it’s very unreliable. Especially in a NAT’d world. Great you “shadowbanned” an IP, but you also impacted many other people and devices behind that public IP including the bad actor. IPv6 is supposed to make NAT irreleva…
IPv6 doesn’t solve this really. You’ll still ban at least /64 and you’ll switch to /48 for the particularly nasty ones. There’s zero reason to ban a specific ipv6 address.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#54I've dealt with some spammers to various degrees. I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to - "shadowban" them. Allow them to use your service, but don't indicate to them that you've identified them as malicious. For instance, when dealing with chat spammers - allow them to chat, but do not show their chats to other users. Another level would be to allow them to chat, but only show their c…
> if the ip address that created the link shortener accesses the link, they get the real redirect, and if a different ip address accesses it If there’s anything I have learned about IP based blocking, it’s very unreliable. Especially in a NAT’d world. Great you “shadowbanned” an IP, but you also impacted many other people and devices behind that public IP including the bad actor. IPv6 is supposed to make NAT irreleva…
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Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#55A couple years ago a client asked me for their own URL shortener service. I found YOURLS (https://github.com/YOURLS/YOURLS) and reluctantly installed it on a cheap, shared, hosting account.
Thankfully after a couple years, I convinced them (it took several tries) to use a 3rd party hosted provider.
Bullet dodged.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#56I've dealt with some spammers to various degrees. I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to - "shadowban" them. Allow them to use your service, but don't indicate to them that you've identified them as malicious. For instance, when dealing with chat spammers - allow them to chat, but do not show their chats to other users. Another level would be to allow them to chat, but only show their c…
Shadowbanning only helps against casual attempts at spam.
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#57What's the benefit of a link shortener, these days? It made sense back before Twitter had one of their own. And I know that some people use it to get link analytics. I've also occasionally seen it used for printed materials, to get pretty URLs that are easy to hand-type. People also use it for malicious purposes, such as hiding malware, or disguising referral links, or otherwise trying to obfuscate where a link is go…
More for vanity and possibly increases engagement. Like you said, if I want a group of people to visit a link. Would you type in “q.ly/abc” or “website.com/20240229/my-blog-title-here/1” But as some have mentioned, QR codes have easily replaced URL shorteners for this purpose anyways. Also I guess for the very small number of people without a device that can’t read QR codes, a shortened url would help them engage
Why do blog titles include a unique ID and a worthless slug tacked on?
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#58Semi related. When I worked at Visa, I developed some ideas around making QR codes slightly more resilient to malicious hijacking when used in the context of a payments or commerce usecase. The idea was for the scanning app to look not just for a QR but also look for adjacent payment acceptance marks (e.g. branded Visa, MC, PayPal, or a merchant's brandmark etc.) and then dynamically only resolve URLs to registered d…
I was recently discussing this subject and I have to wonder if some combination of human readable symbols that is also optimized for machine scanning will emerge.
Right now any phone should be able to parse a url if it can read the type, and so what is the point of QR besides the ubiquity?
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#59[deleted]
Re: I accidentally made my link shortener into a malware honeypot
#60What's the benefit of a link shortener, these days? It made sense back before Twitter had one of their own. And I know that some people use it to get link analytics. I've also occasionally seen it used for printed materials, to get pretty URLs that are easy to hand-type. People also use it for malicious purposes, such as hiding malware, or disguising referral links, or otherwise trying to obfuscate where a link is go…
Sometimes reddit (and likely others) will try to parse a URL's valid characters as formatting and deadlink them (e.g. some wikipedia links with special characters)
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