Shortened URLs are not secure, study finds

For a few years, many services have offered us the possibility of sending a shortened URL to share a file, a folder, an address or simply a link that is too long. In fact, if we do a search on the internet, we can find many web services that offer us the possibility of shortening web addresses. Google and Microsoft are the companies that use the most This type of service when it comes to sharing Google Maps addresses, Google Drive folders or any file or folder that we have stored in our Microsoft cloud storage service, OneDrive.

Martin Georgie and Vitaly Shmatikov, security researchers have discovered that applying brute force attacks on shortened web addresses can be accessed. When we want to share addresses from Google Maps, the addresses are made up of 150 characters, but for ease of use, they are reduced to just six. But that six character combination is not strong enough to withstand brute force attacks and can expose the related information it stores, be it a physical address, a shared folder ...

Georgie and Shmatikov state that being able to access the folders shared by users, it is very simple be able to sneak any malicious file that it dedicates itself to sharing with other people all the content that is stored in it without us ever knowing it. At first you should not panic, since these types of addresses are not published anywhere, but are shared only with the people who should have access to it. In response to this information published by researchers Martin and Vitaly, Google has doubled the number of characters while Microsoft will remove the shortened links from its OneDrive cloud storage service.