This won’t be a new information for some of us, who has spent years surfing the cyberspaces. But for newbies, this information could help them from falling into phishing traps.
At early years of internet booming, there was only few domain name extension such as .com and .gov. But today, more and more new extension were added to the list in order to accommodate large internet user all around the world. And to make it simple, I will try to explain about these domain names in categories.
The categories would be by:
1. Public regular / common
2. Regional
3. Business Lines
Public regular / common domain name
This kind of domain name can be registered and used by everybody. There is no limitation to whom it may be registered. As long as you have money to pay for it and no one own it, you can register and use it. Usually, the price is about 7USD - 10USD /year. It is not expensive at all. The domain name have extensions we are very familiar with. Like .com, .net, .info, .org, .ws.
Regional domain name
This domain name, used exclusively in a country. The original extension is the country code it self.
For example :
1. Indonesia = .id
2. Japan = .jp
3. Hongkong = .hk
4. China = .ch
5. Singapore = .sg
But you can’t register to use this regional extensions (example : paulus.id). Instead, there a domain administrator which maintain a sub domain name to use with the extension. This sub domain name you can use will be vary depend on the regional domain administrator policy.
For in Indonesia, there is PANDI who administer this sub domain name. And the sub domain name for Indonesia is :
1. .co.id (for company)
2. .ac.id (usually for educational institute)
3. .go.id (special for government )
and more
To use this domain extensions, you have follow the regional policy. So you can not register in anonymous as .com or other.
Business Lines
And this last category, is domain name extension which made to identify special business line of the company using it. Example :
1. .tv (for tv station)
2. .edu (for educational)
3. .org (organizations)
4. .info (information provider, such as wikipedia. But can also use for others)
5. .gov (government, but usually for US government other country will use the regional extensions)
6. .mil (militar, as the .gov, this also used by US military)
and more.
This kind of domain name usually ask for your business title to verify the registration. But for .org and .info I don’t think they will do that as I could register to use them easily.
Ok, now we have know the domain extensions that formed the domain name, and we will move on.
A phishing usually create a domain name sound or look a like the real domain name they want to mimic. For example, if they want to mimic the google site to fools your eyes, the might be create a domain name like example below :
- gogle.com
- gooogle.com
- goooogle.com
etc.
So you must remember how to write the domain name correctly. Specially if it is for your online banking. Write it down if necessary (but don’t write down your user id and password of course).
Beside that way above, they (phisher) can also create a sub domain name, like :
- google.mydomain.com
- google.freehosting.com
- google_activate_account.anotherhosting.com
- etc.
Pay attention to the domain name. Sub domain name is separated by dot (.) from the main domain name. Sub domain can be anything they want. But the main domain name will tell you if it real or not. Usually the phishing site will use a free hosting or free web for placed their web pages that mimic some original pages. This is to prepare a complete escape and will be almost impossible to track down the real person behind the scheme. So the only way and safest way to deal with them, is to be aware.
There is another kind of fraud, that fools visitor to spent money in their site. We call it SCAM. I will write about this too. Too many victims falls in to it.
