Security experts Martin Georgiev and VitalyShmatikov reported the results of studies which describe their discovery of susceptibility to short URLs “brute-force” attack, which sufficiently motivated hacker can get to personal data.
The researchers discovered this after they browse the web address used by well-known companies such as Google and Microsoft. Standard URL Google Maps consists of 150 characters, but for ease of use it offers an alternative and shorter than six characters. The combination of 6 characters is small enough to be easily broken using a “trial and error”, which files from cloud storage exposing the “You’re welcome”.
The two experts were able to find Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive files that are shared with short URLs. Some of these files are associated with folders that have “access with permission to write”, allowing everyone to help in the “drawer” to store inserted malicious code. Given that everything you store automatically copied to your desktop, the researchers argue that there is a very real danger of “malware injection” on a large scale. You say that the 7 percent OneDrive and Google Drive accounts that are scanned below ran organisms so.
As an example, the states and the fact that Google Maps often contain directions between two private addresses, and is very easy to discover the connection from this data that should be private. In addition, it may simply discover that someone visited folders, such as medical institutions. The researchers said they also failed to reveal the names of people who were visiting juvenile detention and pawn shops, which are also data that should stay secret.
Contributing Author
Gunjan loves content writing about hot and happening technology. She is editor for technology magazine techprevue.com and also involves in digital marketing. You can follower her on twitter.
