Dan Gauthier of TwinBytes and thank you for checking out our
first of many how-to videos for the computer.
Today we're looking at spoofing. What it is and
how to avoid it. Many times people will receive an email such as this one.
Claims to be sent from the bank. It looks like it has been sent from them, and there's
some urgent matter that you need to go to the website and login with your
information for some reason. and they've conveniently provided a link for you to
click on as well. Now first of all your bank would never send you an email
asking you to click on a link that takes you there. Simply because they know that
many other people are doing that, which is spoofing, and taking you to another
website that looks like theirs, but it's someone else's site that has special
code behind it that's going to track your information. If we were to click on
that link, it's going to take us somewhere else; and how do I know that?
Before I even click on it? Down in the bottom left corner of your screen, on
this little status bar area of the screen, where it's usually blank, when you
put your mouse over a link in an email, it will appear down there in the bottom
left corner, telling you where you're going to be directed to.
If it doesn't match with the link that's in your email, then that's gotta raise
a red flag right there telling you you shouldn't click on it. That's not taking
you to the same place, it's a fake. and this rule applies for eBay, Facebook,
MySpace, any website that requires a login. Once you log in on a fake site or
a site that's been spoofed, as we call it, they track your username and password,
they get that sent to the creator of this spoofed site. Now they're able to go
to the live site, put in your information that they've captured from you.
Now they're into your information. If it's the bank account
they can now get access to your money and transfer it to themselves.
If it's Facebook or some other site they've got access to you you there, which they can
then pull other information such as date of birth, city, your mother's maiden name,
all the other kind of things you can then steal your identity with, which is
another big deal. So don't click on those kind of links. We would expect that it
would take us to this website and which this is the legitimate one,
that I've typed in. Now if we click on the link it would have actually shown us the
same page, however, the top part here would be different, as it shows us now.
and it's got part of the legitimate website listed in here, which at a glance
if you're not looking at the very beginning of it, a lot of people just
skip things and they just glance over. So at a glance, for the most part, it looks
legitimate; but this first part is what's wrong, and that's what should raise the
red flag saying this isn't the right site, and it even tells you right on here
beware of emails asking for personal information. So they're even telling you
right on their own site to be careful. So never click on a link in an email, for
any site that requires a login, unless you were expecting it because you reset
a password or something to that effect. and when it comes to banking, you should
be extra cautious; and if you're not sure you can always post me a question or ask,
call your bank directly and ask them.
This is Daniel from TwinBytes signing off
Thank you and check out our other videos as they come.
Bye for now.