Copy/PasteĪnother excellent approach to validating a suspicious link is to use copy/paste. If you’re using an email program, like Thunderbird, Microsoft Office’s Outlook, or others, most behave just like web browsers: if you hover the mouse over a suspect link, somewhere it’ll display the true destination of the link - most likely in the status line at the bottom of the email program’s window. If you view your email in a web browser - say by visiting or - everything I’ve described above should work for the links displayed in messages.
Email often contains links, and that’s where a lot of these scams happen. This isn’t just about webpages and web browsers. In this case, you can see that my mouse pointer is hovering over the link that says “but Chrome is showing you the URL you’ll really be taken to:. Most browsers show you the target of the link somewhere near the bottom of the window. The target is displayed in the lower left of Chrome’s window. Using Google Chrome, I’ve moved the mouse pointer over the “link, at which point Chrome changes the mouse pointer to a pointing finger. Using the example above: An example of hovering a mouse pointer. All that means is you move the mouse pointer over the link, but don’t click. Hovering your mouse pointer over a questionable link is one way to determine its validity. This is a fundamental component of phishing: making it look like you’re going one place when instead you’re taken somewhere else entirely: usually (though not with our example) with malicious intent, to a site that looks just like the one we expect, except that it’s not. So when you click on that example link that looks like it’ll take you to eBay, it will instead take you to. That looks like a link to eBay, doesn’t it? Here’s how it’s really encoded: The part you see is “ but the target you don’t see is something else entirely … it’s “ “. In HTML, you can see exactly how both parts, seen and unseen, are encoded. To get just a little geeky for a moment, that link is actually encoded in HTML like this: Ask Leo! The part you don’t see is the URL that link takes you to, called the target: “ “. There are two parts: the part you see, and the part you don’t. So let’s go about disrobing those cloaked links.įirst, a little refresher on what a link really is. But the good news is, the most common approaches are the simplest to detect. There are several ways to hide where links go as well. There are several ways to look at a link (both in email and on webpages) before you click on it to make sure it is what it claims to be.
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