How To Be an Internet Sleuth
Have you ever gotten a job offer but something seemed off? What about an unexpected email or text from an acquaintance with a strange link? Has an old friend messaged you on Facebook about an exciting business opportunity? If you think something might be off, time to roll up your sleeves and do some good old-fashioned internet sleuth work.
This is going to be a bit of a longer post, so if your sleuthing needs are in a hurry, use these hyperlinks to jump to the section you want:
- How to See Where a Link Really Goes
- How to Research a Website
- How to See Who Owns a Website
- How to Search for an Image
- How to See What a Website Used to Look Like
- How to Search for Text
- How to Unshorten a URL
How to See Where a Link Really Goes
Starting with the basics: before you click on a suspicious link, you can see where it goes by hovering your cursor over it. Do not, I repeat, do not click. You will see the website that the link is directing you to at the bottom of your browser window.
How to Research a Website
Copy the website and paste it into Google or your browser bar. Make sure you enclose it in quotes, or else the browser bar will try to go to it. The other option is to paste it and then use the down error to select the option to search for it instead. This will allow you to see search engine results without navigating to the website, very useful in case it contains malware or tracking cookies.
How to See Who Owns a Website
When you want to know who owns a website, you need to lookup the domain name registration otherwise known as WHOIS information. Many websites use privatized information these days, but there are still plenty of good uses for it.
If you want to know if an unusual domain in the email you received is actually from your bank, you can look up its WHOIS information. Many corporations will still have their names in the WHOIS records for their domains, so you can feel assured that you are going to a website controlled by them. Using the hover trick from above, view the website that the link is trying to send you to. Copy just the words followed by the .com (or .edu, .biz, etc), which is known as the domain name. Paste that in any WHOIS lookup tool. I like CentralOps or ICANN. If the information is privatized, you may still be able to get a general idea of a website’s trustworthiness if it was registered very recently. This could indicate something suspicious.
How to Search for an Image
A good way to verify that a website or personal profile is legitimate (or not) is to look up the images used on it to see if they are used anywhere else. This is called a reverse image search. Google makes this easy: go to images.google.com. You can click and drag an image right into the search bar, even from another tab in your browser. You can also paste in the URL of the image, which you can get by right-clicking on the image and selecting “Copy Image Address”. Google returns results of websites using this picture and displays visually similar ones.
This can be very useful if you have started talking to someone on an online dating website or social media platform. You can search for their picture to see if it is a stock photo or used elsewhere. This excellent explainer from CNET also has instructions for how to do this on a mobile phone, and several examples of when this feature is useful.
How to See What a Website Used to Look Like
Welcome, my friends, to the amazing website, the Wayback Machine! The Internet Archive is a non-profit that has been taking screenshots of websites for twenty-five years! Simply enter a domain or URL, and it will show you all of the images it has captured over the years. You can click on any one to see what that website looked like on that date.
If you have a website that you are concerned about, it is worth checking to see how long that website has been around. What did it used to look like? Use the Wayback Machine to find old snapshots of most publicly-facing websites on the internet!
How to Search for Text
A simple but effective tool in the internet sleuth’s toolbox that I have personally used in the past to sniff out an imposter website: cut and paste. You can select any text on a website and right-click which will show you an option to search for the text you have highlighted.
Real-world example: when reviewing a website for a bank that I had suspicions about, I copied snippets of the descriptions on the website and pasted them into Google. It turned out to have been a completely stolen template from a real bank’s website, and the fraudster only changed a few of the listed branch addresses.
How to Unshorten a URL
Have you ever seen a link that looked like this: buff.ly/1irhfHu? This is called a shortened URL (website), which is a link wrapped in a shorter link. It can be very handy in these days of social media, especially Twitter that has character limits on its posts. Tinyurl.com and bitly.com are two of the most popular services, known as URL shorteners, that help users do this.
Like so many things, fraudsters have taken something used for good and distorted it for their own means, like distributing malware or phishing websites. Scammers are using URL shorteners to disguise their fraudulent websites, counting on a recipient to click without thinking.
Fortunately, there are also tools we can use to fight back! I’ve seen them called URL unshorteners, lengtheners, and expanders, but the concept is the same. If you paste in a shortened URL, it will return back the full link. Here are some I found with a quick Google search, though there are many others: unshorten.it and urlex.org.
These are some of my tips and tricks for checking out a website or picture of concern. Also, don’t forget to look for that lock in the browser bar! Have any more that you’d like to share? Leave a comment below.