It can be easy to be fooled by a spoofed website that looks and operates like websites you use regularly. In phishing scams, Hackers create fake websites that look very similar to the real ones to get their hand on your information. This can be a huge problem when the websites are somehow money related – Ecommerce, banks, online casinos and gaming sites and any place that may include payments and transactions. A user that didn’t check the security level of an online gaming site, played online blackjack on a un-secured website.
When he won and requested to withdraw his win funds, the website did let him and everything seemed fine. But what he didn’t know is that because the website wasn’t secured, there was a cyber-attack that sniped the transaction and changed its destination and the user never got his winning funds. Of course, the casino lost these funds too. Now, we’ll go through the different security types and will review them – so you won’t fall a victim to an online scam or cyber-attack.
Whether you use a Mac, Windows or Linux, iOS or Android, chances are someone sent you an email, text message or Facebook wall to try to get your personal information. Data is money, and you are a big dollar sign for the bad guys.
Here are some tips and tricks on checking out the deluge of links that swamp you daily, for both your mobile phone and desktop pc.
Table of Contents
Check padlock in your browser address bar
The Site Information button (appears as a padlock) appears in your address bar (URL) when you visit a secured website.
You can quickly find out if the connection to the website you are visiting is encrypted and, in some cases, who owns the site. This can help you avoid malicious containing websites that are trying to steal your and others personal information and even identity sometimes.
Padlock 🔒 aka Green Padlock
A padlock (with or without an organization name) indicates that:
- The connection between the browser and the website is encrypted to prevent eavesdropping.
- You are definitely connected to the website whose address is shown in the address bar; the connection has not been intercepted.
A padlock plus the name of the company or organization, means this website is using an Extended Validation (EV) certificate.
For sites using EV certificates, the Site Identity button displays both a padlock and the legal company or organization name and location of the owner of the website, so you know who is operating it. For example, it shows that PayPal is owned by the PayPal, Inc. [US].
Gray padlock with red strikethrough
A padlock marked in red indicates that the connection between the browser and the website is only partially encrypted and does not prevent eavesdropping or man-in-the-middle attacks.
This icon doesn’t appear unless you’ve manually turned off mixed content blocking.
Gray padlock with yellow warning triangle
A gray padlock with a yellow warning triangle indicates that the connection between browser and the website is only partially encrypted and doesn’t prevent eavesdropping. Thankfully, most up-to-date browsers block those types of dangerous content by default, without the need to do anything.
This also appears on websites with self-signed certificates or certificates that are not issued by a trusted authority.
this icon will not appear unless you’ve manually deactivated mixed content blocking.
Gray padlock with yellow warning triangle
A gray padlock with a yellow warning triangle indicates that the connection between browser and the website is only partially encrypted and doesn’t prevent eavesdropping. Thankfully, most modern browsers block this type of dangerous content by default.
This also appears on websites with self-signed certificates or certificates that are not issued by a trusted authority.
For information about what “partially encrypted” means, see Mixed content blocking in browsers. This is an issue that the site developers need to resolve and fix.
Note: Do not send any sort of sensitive personal information ( such as bank information, credit card data, Social Security Numbers, etc.) to websites where the Sites’ Identity button has a warning triangle icon on the padlock.
Check if the URL is secure
To see whether a website is safe to visit, you can check for security info about the site. Web browsers like Google Chrome will alert you if you can’t visit the site safely or privately.
But what about this link to a supposedly hilarious video that your best friend has just published on Twitter, Facebook? There are several services that you can use to check a link. Google secured Browsing is a good point to start from. Enter this URL https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search followed by the site you want to visit, such as google.com or an IP address. It will tell you if it has hosted malware in the last 90 days.
The Website Doesn’t Have a Privacy Policy.
If a website doesn’t have a privacy policy, they also can’t promise the security of your information. This could indicate that it’s a suspicious website, therefore, move on to a legitimate one that does own a privacy policy.
The URL is Not Correct.
If a website wants your personal information legitimately and its URL should start with an “https://”. Some of website owners redirect the secured to unsecured website and may be the url are look like is not correct.
Note: Do not send sensitive information (banking information, credit card data, social security numbers, etc.) to sites where the Site Identity button has a gray padlock with a red strikethrough icon.
