URL Shortener | Robust Protection for Brand Safety and Reputation Management
zvelo Delivers Hybrid API Solution for Industry Leading URL Shortener
Client Profile
Industry leading link management platform that allows clients to customize and shorten links for branding, increased audience engagement, campaign performance tracking and analytics and seamless integration with other systems.
Industry Background
Over the years, URLs and URL shorteners have become a critically integral piece in the world of digital marketing. While URL shorteners began as simply a way to shorten links, these tools have evolved into robust marketing tracking and analytics platforms that help drive brand growth. Like all other technology advances and innovations, the good also comes with new challenges. One of the challenges with URL shorteners is that they can easily disguise domains and destination links that point to sites with objectionable or malicious content.
The URL Shortener Business Challenge
A leading provider of URL shortening tools was experiencing increased use of its services to disguise malicious, objectionable, and illegal URLs as innocuous or harmless web pages. This created significant problems with public backlash, unfavorable press, and unhappy legitimate customers — negatively affecting the company’s overall reputation, client satisfaction and retention rates.
The requirement was to find a solution to address these issues quickly and effectively by immediately detecting threats, objectionable, illegal, and other unsafe and dangerous web pages. The URL shortener needed a robust and highly scalable solution to deliver enhanced security and brand safety measures to protect users, as well as the reputations of both customers and its own brand.
The URL shortener organization reached out to zvelo and communicated its need for a solution with excellent coverage and accuracy for objectionable and malicious detections and categorizations, as well as one that could process tens of millions or more of URLs daily. The organization’s goal was to identify and eliminate as many malicious and objectionable URLs as possible from their platform, including Malicious, Phishing, Terrorism, Child Abuse, Pornography, Jihadi and similar content.
The organization selected zvelo because of the URL categorization accuracy, coverage, processing performance and scalability for base domain, sub-domain, and full-path, page-level URLs. zvelo’s ability to scale to support hundreds of millions of URLs daily was also a critical factor in the decision process, as was the ability to deploy the zvelo solution within the organization’s data center environment.
The Solution: zveloCAT Hybrid
The winning solution is a “hybrid” that leverages the power of both the zveloDB and the zveloCAT. The zveloDB is set up to run locally in the client’s data center. The local deployment for zveloDB allows for fast, local lookups – covering the first line of defense for detecting threats, unsafe and dangerous content at the domain and subdomain levels. To complement the local zveloDB, the zveloCAT supplies full-path, page-level URL categorization to detect objectionable and sensitive content. Together, this hybrid delivers the joint benefits of extremely fast local lookups for base domains along with the rapid categorization API service for instances which require insight into page-level URLs.
With nearly 500 categories in more than 200 languages, the zvelo database and categorization services provide the coverage necessary for an organization supporting a global marketplace of users.
“We were looking not just for a vendor, but someone who could be a true partner and share our philosophy of making the internet safer and more secure,” said the organization’s CTO. “With zvelo, we found a partner who provides the technical solution for immediate detection of dangerous and unsafe content and web pages, and also shares our vision of what is needed for the Internet to continue to flourish.”
The Results
The zveloDB and zveloCAT “hybrid” deployment delivers unmatched protection, comprehensive coverage, and accuracy in detecting threats, objectionable, and sensitive content. The ability to immediately detect threats and unsafe content and take appropriate action to eliminate or block this content protects users, as well as customers’ investments and reputations.
