In a world where internet usage is increasing exponentially, information security has been more critical than it was before. Links are everywhere on the internet. Links are used to moving you from your current website to another website. While links are good advertising platforms, some of them may contain malware that can steal your personal information and go as far as taking control of your computer.
Links are shared knowing or unknowingly across the internet, and it is therefore advised to examine links before clicking them. Below are some ways that you can achieve this:
1. Link scanners
A link scanner provides security from veiled threats masked as links on your webpage. It approves links returned from web searches and of the web pages visited. A link scanner typically allows you to enter a link and checks for its credibility before you can access the link page. Websites are made up of many web pages; a link scanner verifies each web page before allowing access to the site. It guarantees you that links that may contain malware or links that are fraudulent.
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2. Expand shortened links
Services like bitly are used by anyone who wants to fit a link in social media like Twitter. These services can also be used by malware distributors to hide the link’s destination. By right-clicking a link, a browser plug-in will reveal a link’s destination. It might help, but some malware are deeply masked so that their target may not be uncovered. You can use services like Sucuri, which expands the shortened link and provides state of security of the website.3. Unidentified email links
Emails are what most malware distributors use to spread malware. Links in emails are not to be trusted as they may be a scam to access your personal information. Most mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo come with built-in security measures to help protect you from malware. The Gmail spam filter works by going through all email received and takes them through steps of procedures to determine whether it’s malicious or genuine. Malicious mail is grouped into a folder called the spam folder. It protects you from malicious links.One of the ways of concealing link destination is URL encoding. Basic characters in our world are complex characters in computing world. It is what hackers and malware distributors use because unless you have a decoding tool, it may be hard to understand some of these characters. The best way to prevent this would be to look out for links with strange characters. You should be cautious of links that contain characters that are unfamiliar.
4. Antivirus detection
Most computer machines come with anti malware installed in them. An antivirus
exists on your computer to keep checking for threats that may affect function ability of your system. It occasionally gives you messages when you visit sites that are malicious and usually give you a pop-up warning message when you click on a link. If kept up to date, these antiviruses can be the first line of defense against malware because they can detect threats in advance.It always better to avoid a problem rather than solving the problem. Threats to cybersecurity are ever growing, and the major point of entry for malware is through links. Malware are dangerous to our computers as they may give access to personal information to unwanted parties. Therefore, it is compulsory that as you go on using your computer for various activities, it is your responsibility to make sure that your data and computer are well protected. This is achieved by examining something before you click it. Take time to understand what clicking on something will take you and the kind of threats that it may have.
By 
Dan Munson |
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Author Bio - Dan loves technology and helping others. He feels like writing is a great way to fulfill both of those things. | |
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