Google’s Web Risk solution is a Google Cloud service that lets client applications check URLs against Google's constantly updated lists of unsafe web resources. Unsafe web resources include social engineering sites, such as phishing and deceptive sites, and sites that host malware or unwanted software. With Web Risk, customers can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on over a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining over 10 billion URLs each day.

There are plenty of bad actors on the internet employing tactics like phishing, malware, and sharing exploitative images that can have detrimental effects on individuals, businesses, and communities.

Bitly is a rapidly growing company and due to its scalability it continues to prioritize implementing strict processes to enhance platform protection while fostering a trustworthy user environment. To strengthen its already robust trust and safety program, Bitly partnered with Google Web Risk. This solution stood out due to its unique perspective on the internet and its scalability, making it the ideal partner to support Bitly’s increasing request volume.

Bitly uses Google Web Risk to evaluate every linked URL in real-time against Google’s consistently updated database of unsafe web resources and URLs that violate any of the company’s Safe Browsing policies. Web Risk includes data on more than one million unsafe URLs and continually updates this information by analyzing billions of URLs daily. These unsafe URLs typically include social engineering sites, such as phishing and deceptive sites, and sites that host malware or unwanted software.

Ben Kleiman, Director of Trust and Safety at Bitly said, “Our goal is to keep users safe and earn their trust by leveraging Google Web Risk’s enterprise security service to validate the safety of millions of generated links and QR Codes in real-time. Given the scale and speed of our users generating millions of links each day, Google Web Risk’s ability to handle this type of volume while delivering real-time verdicts is crucial to ensure seamless and safe online experiences.” 

Web Risk confidence scoring avoids false positives

One key area that can be the trickiest for companies is the calibration of confidence scoring to avoid false positives in threat detection for URLs. 

Google Web Risk’s enterprise-grade features include risk scoring and confidence levels, a unique aspect that interested Bitly and added value to the partnership. Web Risk’s confidence scoring helps organizations evaluate the maliciousness level of a URL based on blocklists, machine learning models, and heuristic rules. Web Risk ranks those URLs as low, medium, high, very high, and extremely high risk. 

“We put a significant focus on confidence scoring within Web Risk to maintain customer trust,” said Kleiman. “Failing to block a malicious URL can undermine that trust, just as false positives can hurt user confidence in our links. We meticulously calibrate confidence scoring with Web Risk and have fine-tuned our threshold where our false positive rate has been remarkably low, particularly given the scale of links and QR codes we generate daily.”

Navigating the constantly shifting internet environment proves to be a challenge for every technology company. Bitly recognizes the importance of adopting cutting-edge technology to safeguard its users effectively. 

Bitly has a unique vantage point on the internet since it captures a lot of signals from many different users in many different industries. Kleiman emphasized, “Our goal is to enhance our security infrastructure to make smarter, faster, and more impactful decisions – not just around websites, but also around our users and their associated accounts. Web Risk is now a core part of this effort, and we are looking forward to leveraging more Google resources, like reCAPTCHA Enterprise, which will be the next big thing to enhance Bitly’s capabilities.”

As Bitly’s product offerings grow, so does the complexity of the threat landscape faced by the company’s Trust and Safety team. Kleiman concluded, “As we continue to evolve, Google’s suite of solutions can provide the necessary tools we need to address our evolving needs so that we can stay ahead of the curve.”