Malicious hack impacts 2.2 million shortened URLs

Posted by Joe on June 15th, 2009

URL shortening services, which convert very long website addresses into shorter ones, have become increasingly popular on the Internet over the last two years. Micro-blogging services, which put a limitation on the number of characters that can be used in a message, make URL shorteners very useful for users of services like Twitter.

Malicious hackers targeted Cli.gs, one such URL shortening service, this week and the attack impacted about 2.2 million URLs that had been processed through the service. This means that the longer website addresses would not be available when an individual clicked on a shortened Cli.gs link.

Luckily for Cli.gs users, the company had an established data backup policy that will restore all of the 2.2 million links to normal within the next 24 hours according to the company's website.

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