How To Determine The Safety of a Website

0:00 This program is designed to provide general information with regards to the subject matters covered. This information is given with the understanding that neither the hosts, guests, sponsors, or station are engaged in rendering any specific and personal medical, financial, legal counseling, professional service, or any advice. You should seek the services of competent professionals before applying or trying any suggested ideas. The information contained in this podcast is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for individual professional legal advice. The podcast information was carefully compiled from vetted sources and references. However, Rose Resources outreach to safeguard the elderly cannot guarantee that you will not fall victim to a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the must listen show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday am Pacific time on K four HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams. And now here is your host, Joyce Petrowski.

1:19 Hi, everyone, welcome back. So let's talk about scams. I'm Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose Resources Outreach to Safeguard the Elderly. You can find more information on our website at Roseadvocacy dot org and on the homepage if you scroll to the bottom, you'll find where you can sign up for our email newsletters and or are mailed newsletters. Those come out monthly, and you'll find our social media links. I believe those are up at the top of the page. So today I want to talk about how can you determine the safety of a website. There have been article written that scammers have created hundreds of thousands of fake websites.

2:10 This is just part of how they've evolved over the years, and they you know, they'll they'll set up fake websites to impersonate legitimate companies to make you think you're on the legitimate company website. So a couple of the things, so the U r L which is the actual website address, the http S colon to backslashes, and then the www dot Roseadvocacy dot org, so you can check that to make sure it has an S, so it's the h T T P and then an S which means it's secure that the owner of the website would have had to have purchased a security certificate or security license from.

3:02 And I'm going to use go Daddy as an example because that's where I purchased Rose Advocacy domain from and then got the security uh certificate through them as well. There's also sometimes you'll see a padlock icon and I'm going to share my screen so I can I can show you guys this, So give me just one second here. Let's see here, all right, So I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to type in Roseadvocacy dot org, and that's our that are This lock here is not the padlock that I'm talking about. That happens to be our logo. But when I type it in, it goes you see our logo. Right there is a lock.

3:58 But you'll see these They look like toggle switches. One goes to the left, one goes to the right. That is where you would click on. It says view site information. So if I click on it, it shows you the website and then it says connection is secure. But you could go a little bit farther there you see the padlock connection is secure, and it explains what that is, you know, and you can learn more about that. It says the certificate is valid. So that's one way you can look at it. Now, if you go back, you can also go in and you can look at a whole bunch of information on cookies and site data and and all of that. I'm not going to get into that today, but that is something you can go, you know, farther into here. It tells you what cookies they're used to remember you, for example, to sign you in or personalize ads, and to manage cookies for all sites. You can go right to your settings. And we talk about this a lot in the presentations is whenever you get on a website, it usually will come up and say we you must either accept all the cookies. Sometimes it'll say, uh, manage the cookies or accept only necessary cookies. Well you really should accept only necessary or you could go in to manage and then it'll show you all the cookies and make sure all of them are turned off except for the strictly necessary. And then this is just a little

5:31 bit more information on manage on device, site data, and then site settings again, you could go in here and you can look at all the different you know the different settings for the website. So that is up here as the I'm gonna exit out of here. This looks like a little toggle switch here, one to the left, one to the right. Sometimes you'll see a padlock. Again, if I click on this, you'll see the padlock here showing connection is secure. So that's a quick way to look to make sure that yes, this security certificate is valid and that the site is listed as secure. But as scammers evolved, you know, when they get these they buy these domains to put these fake websites on. They could also buy a security certificate. Right, it's not that expensive to buy a domain, and it's not that expensive to buy the security certificate. So I think now that they know a lot of people start looking for that pad luck that they're looking for the HTTPS to show that it's secured. That they're upping their game and they're like, okay, well we're going to have this on our site too to make people believe that it is a secure site.

6:47 So another thing you can do is you can examine the content. Right, and this was an old way where you could look for you know a lot of grammatical errors or spelling, awkward phrasing, all kinds of stuff like that. But we've talked a lot about artificial intelligence and AI and that that right there, like the chat GBT that helps them not have all those grammatical errors, those misspellings, all of that stuff. It's going to give them everything they need to, you know, put on on the website. So you can't necessarily look at that as well. Again you can or not again sorry, but you can look for contact information, you know, on on the website and you can see ours down here at the bottom. You'll see where we have our mailing address, we have our phone number, our eFax, our email address, you know, a bunch of different links here for things. We have our disclaimer, who designed and is hosted tact information as well. It just kind of helps it seem a little bit more legitimate.

8:05 But then there's some they have these online tools now that you can get on and use to kind of take it a step further to look at the safety or the security of a website. So I'm going to get into those and this is URL void or web of trust. I'm going to get into this URL void here and we're going to do this who is look up? And I believe I'm saying that correctly, and I can. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is the regulator for the who is database of domain names. They go all the way back to nineteen eighty two, so they've got a lot of data. The information that you're going to find in that database can vary from domain registrar to main registrar, but you should be able to see the date somebody registered their webs their domain, their website, if it's expired, the last time the domain was updated.

9:12 Who the registrar are is, like who the registrar is? Like I explained before, mine was go Daddy, so that's one of them. And then you could probably see the owner of the domain. But you're not going to see a lot of personal identifiable information. They had some GDPR regulations which made them the who is not show personal I personally identifiable information in there. So you're going to see. When we do Rose Advocacy's website and look at it, you're going to see a lot of information that says redacted, and that's because they are not allowed to make that publicly available to everyone. So let's go back up here and you can tell I'm just going to click here because I have already typed it in once, so Roseadvocacy dot org. You don't need to put the www. You just put the domain name, which is Roseadvocacy. And then we're a nonprofit, so it's dot org. And then here I have to click because I'm not a robot, and we're going to look it up. And so you're going to see here where it has the domain name Roseadvocacy dot org. The registry ID here it is is who's the registrar. I got the domain at GoDaddy, so you're going to see that come up there and the URL for them. And then the last date that it was

10:46 updated was it looks like November twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. You're so that was almost six months ago. Creation date. You're going to see that it was. This website was purchased August twenty seventh, twenty twenty one. It expires August twenty seventh, twenty twenty five. I'll have I have to go in every year and renew the domain and pay the fee, and so once I do that in the next couple months, you'll see that this will get updated to August twenty seventh, twenty twenty six. You're going to have some information on go daddy, who is the registrar there if you wanted to report abuse, that's their email number or their email address, their phone number. And then you're going to get down here and you're going to find all this information the registrant, the name, the organ the organization, but the street, the city, all of this, the phone. All of this stuff is redacted and that was because of those new regulations which this is personally identifiable information, and so they have all this redacted. But again you can find a lot of information right here at the beginning. To find out if it's a you know, a brand new you're going to be I want to be a little bit suspicious if if the creation date, if it's a brand new website, maybe if it just doesn't get updated at all, just you know, kind of look it out. You look it over, and you can

12:17 also you've got the email address, the website for the for the registrar to kind of check them out to make sure that they're that they're good. All right. So then let's look at the next thing here is let me go back to this PDF we can use again. This is a U R L void dot com. We're going to go back into that, and this is going to kind of look up uh the uh. You can go in and again type in the domain, the website address or the domain and then scan website and you're going to come up and it's going to show the website address. You're going to look at it. The last analysis was done three months ago. I can click here to have it to re scan, but there was zero out of thirty nine detection counts. You can see it matches right here with what it said in the who is directory that this domain was registered on August twenty seventh, twenty one. You could go into the who is look up right through here you could check out the DNS records as well. Gives you the IP address. This happens to be the website of the company that hosts Rose Advocacy.

13:43 Website going to tell you the server locations in the United States, which makes sense, and then you're going to come down here. And this is interesting. So this is where this website scans all of these different engines here and they're going to tell you if they find anything. And that zero out of thirty nine I think it was right up here. All of this is nothing found, Nothing found. On all these different Now if you're interested, you can go in here underview more details and it's going this one here the fake sites list the artist against four one nine. So it'll have a site name, it'll say active date added, updated, all of that, and so you can go through it'll tell you exactly, you know, what the what the site name is and all of that.

14:43 So this is a fake sites list if you want to go in and view all of these, you know, to kind of check them out. It looks like there's one hundred and seventy thousand and five hundred and sixty four on this, So I'm going to get out of there and go back here again. You can go all the way down pick another one right here, let's view more details on this one. Well, that says that might just be let's see. Let me go pick another one bitdefender.

15:23 Let's go into that. We haven't seen any so bitdefender is looking at the website. They haven't seen any suspicious activity from this website. So that's great. So again that's just another way you can go in and check out the reputation and how safe the website is. Now there's also it says check for reviews you can, you know, look on Google reviews. You know, you can look on the website to see if there's testimonials. Kind of just helps to help you to gauge the credibility of the website.

16:03 There's also this Google Transparency Report, so you can see the safety rating of a website from Google. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to type in the Rosadvocacy dot Org and hit enter to search. So the information was last updated on May thirteenth. Site safety can change. The site safety can change over time, so check back for updates. But as of this second they found no unsafe content found. So that's another way through the Google Transparency Report that you can check things out as well. And then the last thing listed on here is Better Business Bureau. It's another way through. It's another avenue for you to do more research to see if people have had complaints and how they've resolved and all of that on there. So I'm going to stop sharing the screen and excuse me. So there's a variety of different ways. Just remember, you know, when you look for that padlock icon, excuse me, I get a drink here, I gotta tickle on all right, or that little toggle switch to the left hand side of the the website address.

17:33 You can click on that and you can review the site settings and see if there's a safety certificate or there's security certificate is valid if it shows that they're a secure website. But as I said, you know, scammers, they can buy those security certificates as well when they when they buy the domain, So you kind of have to you have to add some things. You need to research it out. Like we said, Better Business Bureau looked on the website to see if there's any contact information, and the examining the content. Yes, you know, if you see stuff that's just really bad grammar, all of that stuff, then that right, there's a telltale sign that you might want to get off that. But as we said, with the artificial intelligence, that really helps the scammers and they really don't have the bad grammar and the you know, all of that stuff anymore because of the artificial intelligence, the chat gbts all of that. But use those online tools.

18:38 The the uh you are l void uh dot com. I'm gonna look that back up again, so yeah, you r l void dot com. You can go in and check out the reputation of websites you can go into the who is and look that up, make sure everything makes sense as to you know when the domain was registered, when it's been updated, and then use the Google Transparency Report, which is Transparency Report dot Google dot com, and then backslash safe hyphen browsing and I will go in once this is all loaded up to YouTube, and I will put these links in there as well. But then I'm gonna go into one other thing. I use this a lot.

19:33 I use it on my phone, especially when I'm searching on the Internet. I know a lot of people like to use I think it duc duc Go is one, and there's a couple other ones that have more of a private browsing uh, when you're browsing the Internet, so it's not really tracking cookies and all kinds of stuff like that on you. This one is called in cognito mode U and you can when you open up your browser, meaning if you use Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, you can pray. If you have a if you have a Mac computer, you're gonna want to click the command shift and then end as in Nancy. Any other computer you're going to do control shift and then end as in Nancy, and that opens up a new incognito window in Chrome, or you can select new incognito window from the browser menu in Chrome or Firefox, and once you select that, it's a new window opens and it'll show that it's in the incognito mode and usually has an icon in the top corner, and then you can you can start searching.

20:52 So basically what that does is the majority of the web browsers out there, they keep a wreck of the websites and pages that you visit. By default, they're storing your history of what you've been doing, what you've been browsing on the internet, so you can easily find it and go back to it if you want to later on. But most browsers have the option to temporarily suspend this record keeping, meaning the web pages you'll visit will be kept private, and that's to anyone else that is using that same browser. So every browser has a different name for the setting. Chrome we talked about it's incognito mode, Microsoft Edge, it's in private mode. Safari is private browsing, Firefox is private mode. So we talked about how you can go in and find those but if a lot of people might go in and manually clear their history, clear their cash or their cookies, because sometimes when you have a lot of those going on, the cash or cookies, sometimes it might affect your computer and how it might slow down how your computer's working, or it just might not work like it used to. I'm trying to think of an example, and I can't off the top of my head, but I know a lot of times i'll

22:23 I'll like shoot an email over to I'll be looking at something on Rose Advocacy's website and I click on something and it just doesn't It doesn't bring the pay the new page up like it should. It maybe doesn't bring it up at all. And I'll email my website guy and say, hey, you know, is there something wrong with this page? And a lot of the times it'll he'll be like, clear your cash or in your cookies, and then try it again. It probably will just reset everything. But when your you don't need to manually do that, clear your browsing history, your cash, your cookies. If you're in the private browsing modes, the incognitos, the what else was it? The incognito mode, the in private mode, the private browsing, you don't need to manually go in and clear all that stuff because private browsing modes they don't save your browsing history, your cased pages, or cookies, so there isn't anything in there to delete. So and it really it's it's it affects it to where if somebody else is to get on, say you're using your laptop, like I've got my laptop here and I'm in the incognito mode and so it's private browsing and it's not saving all of that information. So then let's say someone else, Let's say my husband gets on my laptop to do something on the internet. It doesn't save any of that.

23:56 So if he went to history to find a website I that he wanted to look at that maybe I was just looking at, it's not going to show up because it was private browsing mode. So that helps. If you are planning a surprise for somebody and you know, like your spouse or whatever, and or if you both share, you know, and you share computers and stuff, you know, they can't like go into the into the browsing history and go let me see what surprise they're planning and stuff like that. So some people like it, some people don't use it. They just like I said, they go in every so often manually to clear all that stuff. So again up to you. It's an option if you if you want to use it, but just remember the private browsing. It doesn't it's only device specific. So it's not going to let me see here, it's not going to it's it's not going to have any effect on how do I want to say this, it's device specific, it's not going to have any effect on the website itself.

25:06 It's only on your device. It's not tracking the cookies from that website, the cash, the browsing history on your device. So just keep that in mind and remember that the different ways to check the safety of a website, it's always good. And another thing that helps with the safety of websites is your antivirus and anti malware software. You've got it on you've got it running twenty four to seven, you have it on your all of your devices that are connected to the internet, including your phone. And say you accidentally click on a link, it should recognize if it's a bad link and come up and tell you we've detected that this is a malicious site. This is a bad site. Ever, it's going to say, and then it's going to give you the option to say, hey, Nope, I don't want to go there, or okay, yes I'm I'm willing to take the risk, and so yes I'm going to go there to that site. But it gives you the option to not get into that into that bad site. So that's another way. But just remember the ways to do the research. You know, check out the u r L. Make sure it has the S after the HTTP. You can check their security certificate like we showed you just to the left of the of the website's name up in the search or up in the

26:37 where the u r L is. And then you can also do some you should do some online research. Use those online tools. The u r L void, go in and check out the reputation. Go in and check out the who is information so you can see who the registrar is. You can see when the domain was set up, and then use that Google Transparency report to see if they've if Google has found anything that they consider unsafe on that site. And then the reputation one on the URL void. That is really quite interesting that it's going to check all of those different sites that are tracking websites reputation to see if the site you want to that you're researching shows up in any of those. So it's a lot of great information on how you can check the safety of a website. Don't forget you're going to want to have your antivirus anti malware on all your devices that are connected to the Internet. It's just another way to help you stay safe when you're out there browsing and searching for things. And when you are out there browsing and searching, a lot of times you'll see in the search results they're sponsored ads that come up, and it'll say right underneath the r L or the name of the website, it'll say sponsored ad or just say sponsored. You know, scammers will hang out in those

28:11 sponsored ads too, because they know that that kind of gets people's attention and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I want that well, you know whatever it is at that discount, and they'll click on the link through the sponsored ad. Well, you can see the website url that shows up in the in the Google search, and then go to that url yourself, that company's website yourself. You don't need to click on it through the sponsored ad. If you scroll down a little farther, you'll probably find that website listed, but it won't be a sponsored ad. Go into it that way and check to see if there really is that ad in there, because sometimes scammers hang out in those sponsored ads, and it's really companies paying for these ads and having them show up in the first couple of search results, and scammers know again that people are doing that, and so they will hang out in those sponsored ads as well. So be very careful with your website searches, do your research, have your anti virus anti malware software running all of the time on all your devices, and stay safe with your web browsing until next time.

29:28 Visit Rosadvocacy dot org. You can sign up for our monthly newsletters down at the bottom of the homepage. There's one via email. There's one that we mail out to you at the beginning of every month. You can sign up for one or both. You'll find our social media links on there as well. We are on we have the YouTube channel, we have Facebook LinkedIn and Instagram. So until next week, see you then bye bye. Well that's all the novel for this episode. Tune in every Tuesday at eight am Pacific time on KFOURHD Radio at KFORURHD dot com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge, so you have the power to make scam protection your healthy habit, and until then, feel free to reach out to Joyce and let's talk about scams.