Just like clicking a link in email, everything you click when browsing the web is actually activating a URL (uniform resource locator). URLs are one of the base structures that allow the internet to easily be navigated by both humans and computers. Every picture, search result, link or icon that you click has a hidden URL. These can sometimes be seen by hovering, right clicking the link or often they appear in the lower corner of your web browser. Before you CLICK and go ... see if you can spot the destinations. There was quite a level of interest about URLs so lets take another look. A key component of any URL is the domain. A domain tells you who owns the site.
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A good starter resource for learning about these domain levels is: Wikipedia's List of Internet Top Level Domains. As you see in the "tinydancinghorse" example : the top-level domain is a .com, which indicates it is a commercial site if you refer to the Wikipedia link and find the chart as below.
I draw your attention to this for the purpose of showing that in the description paragraph it shows that any person can register (buy for about $9/yr) a .com site. (A very cheap price for a criminal it they are using a fake site to collect and resell PII.) Anyone can own a .com, .org or .net, however there are some top level domains that are reserved and vetted so only verified owners can use them, such as .gov, .edu and .int
One .int you might be familiar with is the www.who.int or the "World Health Organization"; but if you happened to go to the www.who.com site by accident you would see that it is a site that is for the entertainment industry.
Some day there may be 2 or more websites claiming to have a cure for COVID-19 and if one was:
https://www.who.org/covidcure.html and the 2nd was https://www.who.int/covidcure.html
Could you pick out the one that was the impostor site?
Another fun tidbit found in that Wikipedia chart is the country domains that have only been developed since 2017 and if your bank is like mine it has changed to be a .bank domain in just the past year. This is all part of the evolving nature of the internet.
This post was in hopes of answering some of the questions and interest several of you shared about learning a bit more. I believe knowledge is power and when surfing the web we are better armed with a heightened awareness to defend our online safety and security.
I hope this took your understanding of URLs/domain designations and web navigation to another 'level'. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
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