Types of Malicious Links You Should Know

With the growth of the internet, most of the essential things can be done online, and with the increment in internet usage, the number of people involved in cyber-crimes and online frauds has also increased significantly.

Nowadays most script kiddies and hackers are spreading malicious links over the internet. It's important to be aware of these types of malicious links to protect ourselves from cybercrimes.

Introduction to Malicious URLs

A malicious URL is a link that has been created for promoting scams, cyber-attacks, and frauds. By clicking on these URLs, it will download ransomware, virus, trojan, or any other type of malware that will compromise your Devices as well as your Whole network

Cyber Security experts call these types of Links “malicious URLs” but many people know those URLs as a “virus links” or an “infected links”

when we talk about the attacks which are done by emails, malicious links are considered one of the biggest threats

1. Phishing links

Nowadays Phishing is the most common type of Attack in the Cyber World. Many people fall victim to online phishing scams due to their unawareness. Thus it is necessary to be aware of phishing attacks and everyone should have a clear idea about the techniques to identify them.

What Is Phishing?

Phishing is a Cyber Attack in which an attacker creates malicious links and sends them to various people to get their account Information or log-in credentials.

How does phishing work?

Most of the time these phishing links are very easily Identified because Script Kiddies ( refers to People who are doing Hacking using prebuilt tools and don't have much knowledge about Hacking ) are always using some popular tools like ZPhisher, NexPhisher 

By using those tools they probably create links ending with  ngrok.io

So when you see a Link ending with that, now you should know that this like surely a Phishing Link

By using these links they can get

• our IP Address
• Network Type
• And Our Account Credentials ( There are so many different types of Login pages hosted on there so we can use any login page to create a phishing link )

But the Scenarios related to Expertized Hackers are bit different because they don't use those types of free hosts to create a basic phishing

So They are Cloning the required site and hosting that site using a domain that will not be clearly identified as a phishing link, so for the retrieving the required pieces of information they use PHP, Java Script Like Back End Programming Languages

Phishing Methods

So Previously we discussed two ways of creating Phishing links, So now let's look at how the Attackers spread phishing links over the internet or the ways how the attacker sends the phishing link to the required target. 

Attackers spread these phishing links through various methods like

• Text messages
• E-mails
• Through Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram 
• Online forums and websites.

How to Identify Phishing Links?

A phishing link can be easily identified by looking at the URL of that Website in the Search Bar of the Web Browser.

So, Before engaging in any kind of activities on the site you are visiting, first, look at the address bar whether the URL is a legit one or not.

As an example - If you are redirected to a page that looks the same as the original Facebook Page Before entering your user Credentials, you must check the site's URL and verify that this is the Original Facebook Page, else your User Credentials may be compromised 

How to protect yourself from phishing?

• Use web browser extensions / Plugins that may automatically identify phishing websites.

• Always check the address bar of the website before engaging with the site. 

• Always add Two Factor Authentications for all of your Accounts, though you enter your details to a phishing link mistakenly it will reduce the risk

2. Photo Capturing Links

This is also a kind of phishing link but this type of phishing link won't get your Account details but it can Capture your photos through your front camera and back camera

How does this work?

Simply, the generation of this link also can be done through different kinds of tools, like Say cheese 

Once the victim clicks on this link he will be navigated to a Photo Editing Site, the before proceeding, it will ask to give permissions to access the device Camera as this is a photo editing site victim will give the permission without any doubt then the hidden script comes in to play and captures the photos through Front Camera and back camera and sends to the Attacker

How to protect yourself from those types of links?

• check the address bar of the website before engaging with the site. 

• don't grant any permissions before engaging with the site 

3. IP & Location Tracking Links

Hackers try to track the location of people for unethical purposes. One such method is sending links to track locations.

As well as if the hacker can get anyone's IP address it will make it easier to get access to the device related to that IP address

How does it work?

It is not hard to generate links that will track the IP and location of the victim. There are Free tools as well as there are dozens of websites that give the service to generate such kinds of links

When someone opens a tracking link it will capture the Public IP address of that device, Using this Public IP of the Device it can find the Approximate location of the device

How to be safe from Tracking Links?

Never open links random people send you on social media because any legit Link can be regenerated as a Tracking Link so, we can't identify those links just by looking at the URL

So Few Steps we can take are,

• Do not allow unnecessary permissions asked by websites like Location Tracking Permissions.

• Use anti location tracing browser extensions

• Use a VPN before clicking any doubtful links.

• Avoid opening random links on the internet.