Why and how you should careful when clicking on links

A reader of one of my blogs commented: “How does the link thing work? I am new at this and do not want to click on something without first knowing what will happen. (chicken.)”. Well, with the amount of phishing going around these days, it is wise to be “chicken” as you may get scammed. I am going to do one thing here. I am going to create a link to my enviromental blog (hoping to get more greenies) althought the link you see is something else.

Important: Your bank account needs verifying. Please log in and confirm your account details at Citibank login page (close new window to get back to this page). Try clicking on the link and see where it takes you. I promise it is only an innocent environmental blog and totally family safe, and is no scam. I hope you will also enjoy reading that environmental blog.

Note that if I happen to be a scammer, I may specially creat a page that mimik Citibank homepage with a login section which will record your user name and password. A wise “chicken” will first hover over the link and look at the taskbar at the bottom of the page. The actual URL for the link will be displayed there. This is for FireFox and Internet Explorer. For FireFox, an additional aid for security is if you ever land on a secure site like Citibank, the address bar background will be colored yellow, otherwise it will be just the normal white background. This is an additional reason for IE users to get FireFox (close new window to get back to this page). Try hovering your mouse over the “Citibank login page” link and observe what you see. Also, if you are using FireFox, notice that the address bar background color is white and not yellow as it should be for a secure bank login page like Citibank and should alert you that it there is something not right.

For Opera, when you hover your mouse over the link, a “pop-up” will appear to show the actual URL for the landing page of the link.

If you want to learn about how to make clickable links, read post How to make clickable hyperlinks (click “BACK” button to get back to this page).

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