Somewhat related, I've been getting a lot of spam with links to urls of big, reputable, organizations, such as universities.
You'd think that the organization was hacked, but in all these case instead these were old domains that used CNAMEs.
The domain that the CNAME pointed to was once owned and used by the organization, but at some point it was let go, and it ended up being purchased by the spammers.
So, the spammers were able to use links that looked safe, and maybe that also helped with passing spam filters.
Thus, if you manage domains, please keep track of the ones with CNAMEs, recommend the users to tell you when they stop using them, and maybe check every once in a while (better if automatically) that the domain they're pointing to hasn't changed hands.
I'd be curious to know how the spammers find these old cname domains, by the way.
My company use a shortener to reduce how much data gets encoded into QR codes that we use, thus making them work better in marginal lighting conditions with worse phones. However, it is entirely self-hosted (301/302 redirect is not a difficult service to build) to protect us from this exact kind of problem.
Traditionally they were useful at the height of Twitter's heyday, because it used to limit Tweets to 140 characters. SMS is a similar use case, but I disliked it there even more, because it normalised getting official messages from random shortcodes with shortened links -- just like a phishing campaign.
The other replies have largely covered most use cases they can also be handy for less tech savvy people to quickly generate links with unique analytics for marketing purposes.
Before Twitter, they were used to put URLs on physical things like business cards. They increased in popularity once Twitter imposed a 140 character limit.
People then saw that there were lots of secondary benefits. As another comment mentioned, hiding affiliate forwarders / query strings were a huge use back when everyone was trying to score those kickbacks. And then getting metrics on every clickthrough.
The tweet that McDonald's Sweden is proud of what they've achieved, redirected to the Wikipedia page for 9/11, is probably the most quintessentially 'Gen Z' joke to the point that dictionaries ought to use it as the example.
You'd think that the organization was hacked, but in all these case instead these were old domains that used CNAMEs.
The domain that the CNAME pointed to was once owned and used by the organization, but at some point it was let go, and it ended up being purchased by the spammers.
So, the spammers were able to use links that looked safe, and maybe that also helped with passing spam filters.
Thus, if you manage domains, please keep track of the ones with CNAMEs, recommend the users to tell you when they stop using them, and maybe check every once in a while (better if automatically) that the domain they're pointing to hasn't changed hands.
I'd be curious to know how the spammers find these old cname domains, by the way.
Traditionally they were useful at the height of Twitter's heyday, because it used to limit Tweets to 140 characters. SMS is a similar use case, but I disliked it there even more, because it normalised getting official messages from random shortcodes with shortened links -- just like a phishing campaign.
And many of them provide analytics to see who’s clicking your link.
Or for historical context, this is all Twitter's fault since its character limit included links too.
I host my own now, for free and for fun.
People then saw that there were lots of secondary benefits. As another comment mentioned, hiding affiliate forwarders / query strings were a huge use back when everyone was trying to score those kickbacks. And then getting metrics on every clickthrough.
Imagine if someone is using curl | bash on a shortened URL because "it's too long" and you can't see where the link is going.
https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/228935671061020673?a=87...
https://x.com/realdonaldtrump/status/350628162595590148?a=Jk...