Shortened URLs Make File Sharing Less Secure, Cornell Researchers Find
Found on eWEEK on Thursday, 21 April 2016
In a paper published in April, two researchers revealed that the 5- and 6-character URLs produced by popular shortening services could be easily searched to discover sensitive documents inadvisedly shared by their owners. Attackers could scan shortened URLs at a sustained rate of 2.6 lookups every second, and would only have to pay $36,700 to rent the cloud computing time necessary to do so, co-authors Martin Georgiev and Vitaly Shmatikov stated in the report.
That should be pretty obvious. Same goes not only for shortened URLs, but also for file hosters. Instead of living with this insecurity, just encrypt the file before you upload it.