Many of you might wonder whether it is safe to use a short URL. The biggest security risk is that you cannot know to which page the link redirects when you click the shortened URL. However, there are some websites where you can check long URLs without visiting the short URLs. This way, you can prevent yourself from visiting phishing websites or downloading malicious apps. You can go through this guide to get a complete idea of whether to use short URLs and stay safe from security breaches.
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What is a Short URL?
A short URL is nothing but using a shortened URL instead of a long URL. The main purpose of shortening a URL is to increase the drive traffic, gain trust from visitors, company growth, etc. Moreover, you can create a custom URL for your business profiles by using this tool. Some of the benefits of shrinking long URLs are listed below.
- It helps your links get recognized by the search engines and ranked.
- It will make your link look appropriate and appealing.
- Short links look genuine, which gains the trust of the users.
- It can be optimized or redirected when needed.
Is Short URL Safe to Use?
Though there may be many useful things, there are also some hiding factors behind short URLs. It cannot be assumed that every short URL is from the right source, as hackers also use the short URL to gain the trust of the visitors. The main disadvantage of the short URL is that it is weaker than the longer URL. This increases the chance for vulnerabilities on a short URL.
A hacker can easily inject malicious code or malware into a short URL. Moreover, these short links are easily modifiable and redirectable. So, when a visitor opens an affected URL, it may direct them to phishing sites, leading to the loss of privacy credentials. In addition, hackers can also perform man-in-the-middle attacks or DDoS attacks.
How to Stay Away from Malware Links?
Here are some tricks to safeguard your privacy and user data when using shortened URLs.
- Use our safest shortened URL generator for free.
- Avoid clicking the shortened URLs if you think they are suspicious.
- If you find short links with a secure password, you can open them without hesitation.
- Before visiting the link, check whether the tool used to shrink the URL is legitimate and trustworthy.
- Install the Greasemonkey extension on Chrome and Firefox browsers. This extension will let you know the malicious URLs by marking them red when you try to open them.
How Safe is URL Shortener?
As mentioned above, our free URL shortener (urlsrt.io) is a highly cloaked shortening tool that offers two-factor authentication to ensure the security of visitors and links. You can activate the two-factor authentication on the urlsrt.io tool and enhance your security while shortening links.
How to Reveal Full URL Using a Shortened URL?
You can use the following websites to view the long URLs of any shortened links.
- unshorten.it
- getlinkinfo.com
- urlex.org
