URL redirection

Abstract: A method and apparatus for tracking the navigation path of a user that has been directed to a second site on the WWW from a first site on the WWW. A URL is received at the second WWW site when the user is directed from the first site to the second site. At the second WWW site, information representative of an identity of the first WWW site is captured by identifying a first code in the URL. A destination web page is determined for the user, and a revised destination web page is formed by attaching a second code representative of the identity of the first WWW site into at least one selected web page link associated with the destination web page. The revised destination web page is then transmitted to the user.

Abstract: A method and system for sending and receiving Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in electronic mail over the Internet. An electronic mail document containing a URL may have several different types. If the message type indicates a URL, when the received URL type document is read or browsed using a multimedia Internet browser, the URL is looked up so that the information corresponding to the URL is displayed without necessarily displaying any portion of the received message. If the received document is of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) type, the document may be displayed and a user may "click" on the URL to look up the information corresponding to the URL. If the received document is of the text type, the text may be converted to the HTML format and the HTML format document displayed so that a user may "click" on the URL in order to look up the information corresponding to the URL without the need to type in the URL address.

Abstract: A Web browser running on a client machine typically includes an address field in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be entered. The URL identifies a particular server (or file) located at a target Web site. If a given URL is entered incorrectly at the Web client, a fuzzy URL detection scheme automatically performs a fuzzy search that returns a list of URLs that most closely match what was originally entered into the browser address field. The user can then select the correct URL from the list and launch the browser to the desired site, or to a directory or file within that site. If the fuzzy search does not reveal a match, the browser may contact a server dedicated to performing a broader fuzzy search. In another alternative, the browser contacts a Web server and the fuzzy search is implemented at the Web server in order to return a particular file.

Abstract: Twitter is prone to malicious tweets containing URLs for spam, phishing, and malware distribution. Conventional Twitter spam detection schemes utilize account features such as the ratio of tweets containing URLs and the account creation date, or relation features in the Twitter graph. These detection schemes are ineffective against feature fabrications or consume much time and resources. Conventional suspicious URL detection schemes utilize several features including lexical features of URLs, URL redirection, HTML content, and dynamic behavior. However, evading techniques such as time-based evasion and crawler evasion exist. In this paper, we propose WarningBird, a suspicious URL detection system for Twitter. Our system investigates correlations of URL redirect chains extracted from several tweets. Because attackers have limited resources and usually reuse them, their URL redirect chains frequently share the same URLs. We develop methods to discover correlated URL redirect chains using the frequently shared URLs and to determine their suspiciousness. We collect numerous tweets from the Twitter public timeline and build a statistical classifier using them. Evaluation results show that our classifier accurately and efficiently detects suspicious URLs. We also present WarningBird as a near real-time system for classifying suspicious URLs in the Twitter stream.