3 signs you’re on a hacked website

SCAMMERS want to steal your passwords and financial data with fake websites. But where do they host them, and how to spot a fake?

Beware: hundreds of thousands of websites are fakes. They’re made to look like the sites of popular online stores, banks, and delivery services, but with just one purpose: to steal your passwords and financial data. Victims are lured to such sites by phishing emails, messenger chats, and even paid ads. But don’t despair: even if you click on a bogus link, it might still be possible to escape the scammers’ clutches without loss. As long as you spot the fake in time…

Where do phishing sites get hosted?

Sometimes scammers create a special new website and register a name for it that resembles the original (for example, netflik.com instead of netflix.com). Our separate post on fake names is worth checking out. But such sites are expensive to make and easy to block, so many cybercriminals take a different route. They hack legitimate sites of any kind, then create their own subsections where they publish phishing pages. It’s very often that SMBs that fall victim to such hacks because they lack the resources to constantly update and monitor their websites. Sometimes a site hack can go unnoticed for years, which is a godsend for cybercriminals.

One of the most popular web content management systems is WordPress, and the number of hacked sites on the platform runs into the tens of thousands. However, once you know what to look for, it’s not hard to detect such sites yourself.

First sign of fakery: Mismatch between site name and address

When following a link in an email, a social media post, or an ad, it pays to take a look at the URL of the site you land on. If it’s a hacked site, the discrepancy will be staring you in the face. The name of the service the fake site pretends to be might crop up somewhere in the directory path, but the domain name will be completely different; for example: www.medical-helpers24.dmn/wp-admin/js/js/Netflix/home/login.php. You know perfectly well that Netflix lives at netflix.com, so what’s it doing on medical-helpers24?

Checking the URL requires a little more effort on mobile devices because many apps open