Surfing & Staying Safe

Earlier this morning, at a networking meeting, a few of us were having a conversation that started around GDPR, evolved in to experiences with IT scams and had morphed in to a discussion around how to stay safe when surfing the web and interacting with emails as we were ushered towards our breakfast.

I figured that some suggestions on how to stay safe might be something people would find interesting. Without further ado I’ll start this series of articles with one on:

Verifying Links

One thing we discussed was how you could “hover” over a link in an email to see where it was really going to send you.

For example this link will send you to our website. The following link might look like it would send you to the BBC it will actually send you somewhere else: www.bbc.co.uk (it’s ok to click, it goes to the Channel 4 website instead).

If you “hover” the mouse pointer over the link in Outlook (in particular) it will display the full text of the actual link to you (either in a floating box by your mouse, or in the lower “status bar” at the bottom). Other programs, like your internet browser of choice will do the same thing (or at very least display it similarly); typically in the status bar at the bottom.

Link Shortener Services

There are services out there, like https://goo.gl/ that allow you to create shorter links like this: https://goo.gl/UXa8Ec (again this is safe – it’s just our site again).

Generally these are used to reduce the number of characters being used, or to share long and complicated links. Sometimes they’re used maliciously to “hide” where they are actually sending you.

With that in mind, there are services to do the reverse and “unshorten” the link, like https://unshorten.it/. That will tell you where you’ll be pointed to if you were to click on the link.

Once you know the full address (called a URL – Uniform Resource Locator) you can:

Check where it actually is sending you

A URL looks something like this (this is a made up example):

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/SomeFolder/SomePage.html

The trick to understanding where you will really be sent is to look for the first single / character. Once you’ve found that, follow the chain to the left:

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/SomeFolder/SomePage.html

...

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/

You’ll find the top level domain (TLD), like “.com”, “.co.uk”, “.co.au” or one of the many new ones like “.life” first:

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/SomeFolder/SomePage.html

...

TLD = .co.uk

Then follow the chain back to the left and before you come to the first full-stop you’ll find is the actual domain of where you will be sent:

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/SomeFolder/SomePage.html

...

Domain = code56

Everything to the left of this (separated by full-stops) is a “subdomain” and is under the control of whoever owns the domain we found above. This means they can set up any number, or length, of subdomains to make it look like the link is suppose to go somewhere else. In this case, the subdomains are:

http://something.i.made.up.code56.co.uk/SomeFolder/SomePage.html

...

Subdomain = up
Subdomain = made
Subdomain = i
Subdomain = something

They could be anything. An example I saw did a really good job of making the link look like it was supposed to be an Amazon UK link. It was really long & complex and initially it looked good.

If you’re unsure and think it might be legit, then you need to:

Copy the whole URL

If you right click a link, depending on the program you’re using, there is generally an option to “Copy Hyperlink” or “Copy Link Address”.

That’s all you need to do in this step! 🙂

Now you can:

Check the reputation

The team at Webroot have a free tool anyone can use to check a URL and get a reputation report over here: http://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php

Just paste the whole URL you copied earlier in the box & then prove you’re not a robot and you’ll get a reputation report.

The report will tell you all sorts of details further down the page, but the first line boils everything down to whether the link is trustworthy or not.

If you’re still not 100% sure, my advice would be to not follow the link.

If you know a friendly IT Specialist by all means get in touch with them to double check; they really shouldn’t mind 🙂