I have often mentioned that you need to be careful where you click on the Wild Wild Web. When you click on a link that looks like this http://yahoo.com you may expect to land at a Web site. Almost always, that is what happens. However, what you see is not necessarily what you get.

The link can be hijacked, and you could end up anywhere. This is because the underlying link, or address that is attached to http://yahoo.com can in fact be anything at all. It could even be a malicious site. So what to do?

There are one or two precautions you can take, and other tricks as well if you get stuck at a site you cannot or perhaps should not close. Before clicking on a link, slide your mouse over it. Now look at the bottom left of your screen. You will usually see a Web address. It should be the same as the link you just slid your mouse over, or it should be the address you were expecting. You can also right-click the link and click Properties. You will see the address the link should take you to, among other things.

Now click the link. If you land on a strange or unexpected site, or get a bunch of pop-ups, be careful. I just said you might get a site or pop-up you should not close. Why? You may see a few buttons to click, such as OK, No, Cancel, or of course the little red “X” in the upper right to supposedly close the window. But clicking any of the buttons, or even the little “X” may actually initiate a scan of your computer, or a download.

So you should close the window by right-clicking its tab in the Taskbar at the bottom of your screen, then click “X Close”. Sometimes this will not work, or you will not even see a tab. In that case, right-click a blank area of the Taskbar and click Task Manager. In the list, click on the offending program to highlight it, and click “End Task”.

How is a hyperlink hijacked or misrepresented? Let us count the ways. It can be very simple. When you see a link on a Web page, you are looking at a few words of text that the webmaster has linked to a Web address for you, behind the scenes so to speak. This makes a clickable link. But that address can be anything he pleases. It does not have to be the address you actually see, which is why you should check it as above, before clicking.

A les frequent, more complicated method is to break into a Domain Name System (DNS) server and alter the domain name records. When you request that Yahoo site, for example, your computer goes to a large DNS computer on the Internet to translate http://yahoo.com into an IP address, or string of numbers. Then it uses the numbers to find the site for you.

Recently, a large American ISP suffered a DNS attack. Hackers associated a different IP address with the ISP. So requests for the ISP’s Web site were redirected to the hacker’s own server and Web site. The lesson for all of us? Think before you click!

Syd Tash is a noted computer security consultant and author of How to Protect Your Computer Online. He has been keeping Internet surfers safe and secure since the last century. Find out how he does it; protect your own computer with five layers of protection right here: = > http://MyPCSecuritySite.com

You may include these Tips in your Web sites and publications provided they remain unchanged and include the above paragraph, with the author’s name and Web site. You can also get a direct URL to this post. Click the title, then copy the URL in the browser address bar.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!