"We launched the Google URL Shortener back in 2009 as a way to help people more easily share links and measure traffic online.

What that statistics say is that any given (public) URL shortening service will likely be abused and at some point develop a bad reputation.

At application layer, a request includes basic information: IP address of client, full URL, and request method.

This study, thus, is proposing a machine learning technique which combines URL characteristics, web page contents, domain name features, Alexa's site ranking and top search engines' results to predict unknown phishing URLs.

In this section, we look through different methodologies adopted for identifying URL based Phishing and CSRF attacks.

The multiple reviewer web site review process works as follows: For example, reviewer A receives the website www.example.com to review and categorizes it as “Nudity,” independently reviewer B receives the same URL and reviews it as “Nudity” so the URL is added to the master URL Review database.

Google's Saurabh Sharma — who has a custom URL himself now — wrote on Google+ today that "we'll be offering custom URLs to many more profiles and pages in the future."

It's notable the custom URLs service does not let you pick your own URL, but you can seek a different one.

Commtouch's GlobalView URL Filtering is a cloud-based URL filtering solution designed to provide insight into security threats, identifying harmful sites before users are exposed to them.

Symantec Intelligence reported earlier this year that spammers had set up their own URL shortening services to better conceal their spam sites and make them harder to block.

A common measure of URL decay is the half-life, defined as the period of time required for half of a defined Web literature to disappear (Koehler, 2004; Goh and Ng, 2007).

"Twitter encourages the use of shortened URLs, which could be a problem if, as some reports indicate, the Twitter URL check would only work on full-length Web addresses," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan's Chief Technology Officer (CTO).