“The idea is to create a link that contains a clean page, redirecting to a phishing page.” “Plus, more employees have access to billing and invoice information, meaning that a spray-and-pray campaign can be effective,” Fuchs wrote. More recently in late 2021, Jeremy Fuchs of Avanan wrote that the use of a LinkedIn URL may mean that any profession - the market for LinkedIn - could click. Way back in 2016, security firm Fortinet blogged about LinkedIn’s redirect being used to promote phishing sites and online pharmacies. Let me be clear that the activity described in this post is not new. 26 sample from Urlscan shows a LinkedIn link redirecting to a Paypal phishing page. 3 example that leads to a phish targeting Amazon customers.

Urlscan also found this phishing scam from Jan.

31 that uses links to redirect anyone who clicks to a site that spoofs Adobe, and then prompts users to log in to their Microsoft email account to view a shared document.Ī recent phishing site that abused LinkedIn’s marketing redirect. This search via Urlscan reveals dozens of recent phishing attacks that have leveraged the Slinks feature. Urlscan.io, a free service that provides detailed reports on any scanned URLs, also offers a historical look at suspicious links submitted by other users. The trouble is, there’s little to stop criminals from leveraging newly registered or hacked LinkedIn business accounts to create their own ad campaigns using Slinks.

Here’s the very first Slink created:, which redirects to the homepage for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. These links or “ Slinks” all have a standard format: “” followed by a short alphanumeric variable.

The LinkedIn redirect links allow customers to track the performance of ad campaigns, while promoting off-site resources. If you received a link to via email, SMS or instant message, would you click it? Spammers, phishers and other ne’er-do-wells are hoping you will, because they’ve long taken advantage of a marketing feature on the business networking site which lets them create a link that bounces your browser to other websites, such as phishing pages that mimic top online brands (but chiefly Linkedin’s parent firm Microsoft).Īt issue is a “redirect” feature available to businesses that chose to market through.

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