Many types of cyber attacks rely on sending a link in a way that encourages people to trust it and click on it. In order to identify a malicious URL it is helpful to understand the parts of a URL and how hackers can hide their intent by putting something you are expecting to see (like “stolaf,” “apple,” or “amazon”) into the wrong part of the URL.

The first and most important thing to focus on is the domain part of the address. This is the stuff that comes between the two slashes and the first single slash. In this example, that’s “www.en.company.com”. This tells you the domain of the link.

Most of us are familiar with Top Level Domains (TLDs) whether we know them by that name or not. Common TLDs include .com, .org, .gov, and .edu. But there are now more than 1500 TLDs. If you think it’s coming from St. Olaf, the domain will most likely be “stolaf.edu” and not “stolaf.com”, “stolaf.org”, “stolaf.xxx” or any other TLD.

These are examples of legitimate URLs associated with St. Olaf. The yellow parts show the domain that is hosting the resource. The green parts show the hostname for the service on that domain. The other parts are important for getting you to a particular resource, but they are less important when it comes to identifying whether the domain providing this resource is legitimate or fraudulent.

When you log into a St. Olaf site, you will most commonly use a Google login page. Hackers can recreate the look of a Google login page, and they can send an email that looks like it’s coming from Google or some other organization. But most of the time they host those fraudulent resources on an unusual domain. So, carefully look at the address bar in your browser to determine if a site is legitimate before entering your username and password. Learning how to (and taking the time to) review those URLs is a really important step in knowing whether or not to click on that link or enter your password.

If you ever have a question about whether an email or a domain is valid, please don’t hesitate to contact the sender of the email directly (not by replying to the email) and wait for confirmation from that person. You are also welcome to reach out to the Help Desk at 507-786-3830. Thank you!