January 29, 2004

Microsupport

Elizabeth Lawley found this pretty funny:

Things that you can do to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

And it is funny. Plus they apparently have forgotten about right click, copy link location, paste which is much easier and much quicker.

As I read through the knowledge base article I wondered, and still wonder, just how many users will ever read this or if they do start reading the article will get far enough to find this nifty JScript command that you can paste (not type) into your address bar (IE or Moz) to compare a sites actual URL to the URL in the address bar:

javascript:alert("The actual URL is:\t\t" + location.protocol + "//" + location.hostname + "/" + "\nThe address URL is:\t\t" + location.href + "\n" + "\nIf the server names do not match, this may be a spoof.");
If the URLs don't match you likely want to leave that site quickly especially if you thought it was your bank.

Posted by Steve on January 29, 2004
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