McAfee has joined the URL shortening game (alongside known favorites such as bit.ly, saf.li, ow.ly, etc.) with their new service, mcaf.ee. This service is designed to provide the web community with piece of mind knowing that any link referred to by mcaf.ee is secure, containing no malware and not pointing to a malicious site.

To celebrate this exceptional service, we’ve developed a Firefox add-on which makes using this service a breeze. After installing this add-on from the Firefox add-on site, you will be able to right-click either on the page in any location to receive a short URL for the current page or on any link in the site and receive a short URL for the link target. After shortening the URL, two popups will be displayed, one informing you of the long to short URL transformation. This popup includes a link to McAfee’s trustedsource.org portal, allowing you to gather even more pertinent security information. The other popup is a notification informing you that the short URL you requested has been copied to your clipboard, allowing you to easily paste it anywhere you like.

This add-on uses the mcaf.ee service which utilizes McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence information. The mcaf.ee service allows users to create short URLs, which are checked against McAfee’s GTI databases prior to being shown to the end user – no more rogue short links (http://mcaf.ee/b1d069) on Twitter going to malware sites.

Screenshot:

Context menu item for shortening a link on a page

Context menu item for shortening a link on a page

Popup displaying short URL of specified link along with notification informing user that the short URL has been copied to their clipboard.

Context menu item for shortening the URL of the current page

Context menu item for shortening the URL of the current page

Popup displaying short URL of the current site along with notification informing user that the short URL has been copied to their clipboard.