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version 26.5.1 · Western Australia · Est. 2011·Microsoft Partner & Reseller · HP, Yealink, Ubiquiti, Kyocera
— Stay safe · Web browsing

How to spot a fake website before you type.

The URL is the first place an attacker lies to you. Six seconds of looking saves a stolen password.

Fake websites are now indistinguishable from real ones at first glance — same logos, same fonts, same colours, same checkout flow. The only thing that can't be perfectly faked is the URL. Six seconds spent looking at the address bar catches almost every phishing site before any damage is done.

11×
Year-on-year growth in lookalike domains, 2025
0.4s
Average time most people spend looking at a URL
82%
Of credential phishing sites caught by URL check alone
// CHECK #1

Read the domain from right to left.

The most important part of any URL is the last word before the first single slash. whedo.it/login is real. whedo.it.account-secure.com/login is owned by account-secure.com — a completely different website pretending to be us. Always read right to left to find the real owner.

// CHECK #2

Watch for the typosquat.

Attackers register domains one character off the real one: microsft.com, amaz0n.com, linkedln.com (lowercase L instead of I). On phones, the address bar is shrunk — single-character swaps are easy to miss. Bookmark the sites you visit often so you're not retyping them each time.

// CHECK #3

The padlock means encryption, not safety.

Every site with HTTPS has a padlock — including 84% of phishing sites in 2025. The padlock means the connection between you and the website is encrypted; it says nothing about who runs that website. Don't let the green padlock relax your guard.

// CHECK #4

Suspicious subdomains are not the domain.

A URL like login.microsoft.com.security-alert.io looks Microsoft-y because the words are there. The real owner is security-alert.io. Microsoft and Google never put their service names inside someone else's domain — the brand is always closest to the slash.

// CHECK #5

Hover, don't click.

On desktop, hover any link without clicking — the destination appears bottom-left of the browser. On phones, long-press the link to reveal the URL. If the link text says one thing and the destination shows another, the email or page is hostile.

// CHECK #6

When in doubt, type it yourself.

Never click a link in an email to log into anything important — bank, M365, payroll. Open a new tab, type the address you know is correct, and log in from there. Two extra seconds, and the phishing trap can't fire.

The technical mitigations whedo.it deploys.

User-side awareness is half the answer. The other half is technical — turn the tenant into a hostile environment for phishing.

Want this rolled out to your team?

whedo.it runs quarterly phishing simulations and short awareness sessions for client teams. 20 minutes, six topics, the kind of attacks your industry is actually getting.

+61 421 346 887
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