On the Internet, we all come across text links that are linked to other pages/sites. When these links are clicked they take us to a new destination. for example [ http://www.google.com/ ], link takes you to google homepage as expected. However, a harmless looking text link could be a deceptive link that could lead to a site specifically set up for stealing personal information.
Here's an example of what Iam talking about
The above link takes you to the yahoo homepage instead of google.com. As HTML coders will point out, links are constructed with two pieces of vital information : destination url and anchor text
Anchor text is displayed to the user as a clickable link and destination url is where the link is intended to go. in the first example both the destination url and anchor text are the same and therefore the link works as expected, however in the next example the destination url has been modified to link to yahoo.com instead of google.com and therefore the user is taken to yahoo.com
How can this be a threat to me? you might ask. Let us imagine this scenario. You are browsing a random site and you are presented a link to login to your gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail, where you will get the link to download some goodies. the page that opens looks exactly like the regular web mail service you use, but this random site has used a deceptive link to take you to a different site that has been cleverly constructed to match the look and feel of your regular web mail. Once you enter your email address and password on this site, it is logged and the security has been compromised.
How can you protect your personal information from deceptive links? Firstly, do not blindly trust the links on every site. To get to your regular web mail service, type the URL in the Address Bar to get to Web Mail Service.
