Online Safety: How To Check if A Shortened Link Leads You To Malicious Websites
Nowadays malicious hackers don’t need to hack their way into your house to get the credit card or other personal data in your house. All they need is to understand you, your weaknesses and understand your interests. Having done that, being pawned is a matter of mins. <SOCIAL ENGINEERING> Having known your interest, the next step is to craft an email and attach a file or link that leads you to a hunting ground. You’re the prey my friend!
In this short series, I’ll concentrate on the security of shared shortened links. To start with, I’ll show you how you can easily identify where a shortened link leads to before you think of clicking it. It doesn’t matter who sent you the link with the shortened URL. Your online safety comes first!
Why short links? well, “malicious” hackers try to craft the original link in a ‘mask’, to avoid you the victim from easily recognizing it. Below is a scenario that involves two links of which one of them is the original URL, and the other a shortened one:
Scenario: between http://malwareinjector[.]com and http://newwinner[.]com /http://btjsj[.]com links, which one on your opinion do you think a non-techie is more likely to click?Steps To Check Where A Link Redirects To Before Opening:
Step 1: Copy the link sent to you either from an email, text message, WhatsApp group &c.
Step 2: Open https://wheregoes.com and paste the copied link from step 1 above.
Step 3: Checking whether the link extracted from the shortened link is malicious. To do so, use this link checker https://www.psafe.com/dfndr-lab/ and paste the extracted link from step 2 above.
Hope this will helps someone out there!
Bonus:
- What is a Malicious URL?- Intro To Malicious URL and How to Avoid them
- What is Phishing?- Intro to Phishing & How to Protect yourself against it
