A phishing URL checker helps you detect unsafe links in emails, texts, or social media messages. Cyber criminals use unsafe links to steal your data or infect your device with malware. The best way to protect yourself from such threats is to scan suspicious links using a malicious link scanner or a phishing URL checker. The free tools are easy to use, and they offer a quick safety report of the link.
Domain Reputation Security: Safeguarding Your Online Presence
Malicious URL scanners use a combination of blacklists and deep machine learning to accurately identify phishing, malware, viruses, parked domains, and command-and-control (C2) URLs. They also provide real-time risk scores for improved decision making.
To determine the validity of a URL, they analyze the text content and visual appearance of the website. They look for spelling mistakes, character substitutions (like ‘0’ for ‘o’), and homographs (letter combinations that mimic the same sound, such as Cyrillic “a” and Latin “a”).
They also check whether the domain has SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption, which is an essential feature in websites where you enter sensitive information. A secure website will have ‘https://’ at the beginning of its address, while a non-secure one will start with ‘http://’. They also check the top-level domain, which is a unique name that identifies an Internet server or domain. If the website is registered in a country with a high number of domains being used as phishing sites, it is likely to be a phishing site.