Google, Microsoft Address Problems in Their URL Shorteners

[HardOCP News]

Researchers from Cornell Tech university have published a paper outlining serious privacy risks discovered in shortened URLs from cloud services such as Microsoft's OneDrive and Google Maps. According to the article, hackers can use brute force attacks to access files or even driving directions.

According to research carried out over 18 months, the two have found that most URL shortening services employ short random character tokens, which attackers can break with brute-force attacks. This type of attack allows a third-party to scan massive batches of random shortened URLs, revealing the long URLs behind, which in some cases may link to unprotected private files holding sensitive or corporate information.

 

[SparkedFire]

I guess that's why OneDrive got rid of them.

 

[GaryJohnson]

The real problem is all the unprotected private files and not the short urls that point to them though.

 

[Quix]

The real problem is all the unprotected private files and not the short urls that point to them though.

Funny how people like to blame the symptom and not the cause isn't it?

 

[westrock2000]

They were able to get sensitive private data from Google Maps? FUCK!