In a report is published by McAfee, they urge internet users in the wake of phishing and malicious email to forgo clicking on links and start to type in the address they want to go into their browser.
The question is will this notice by Mcafee if it catches on get surfers back into the habit of direct navigation?
Here is the full report:
“”You Name It–Spammers Have Faked It
Name any famous or popular website, they all seem to have become the prime targets on spammers lists. Researchers at McAfee Labs have seen an increasing trend wherein famous websites like Amazon, Ebay, Youtube, WordPress, Wikipedia, Godaddy, Eventful.com, and many more are abused by spammers to provide a legitimate appearance for the email and ultimately have them delivered to the user’s inbox.
These spam messages are drafted in such a manner that they appear to be legitimate on first view. All these emails have a look and feel as that of a legitimate message from one of these popular sites. A novice user could have easily fallen prey to these emails if the user would have judged the message by its appearance. Appearances can be deceptive and so the spammers have taken advantage by faking messages of well-reputed websites.
Let’s examine a couple of common spam messages of these types.
These types of spam have one important thing in common. All links in the email–Help, Product Info, Copyright Tips, Terms of Use, Legal Agreement, Customer Support–have the same URLs associated with them, with an html or htm extension. This looks quite odd; generally these links have a different URL.
Clicking on any of the links redirects to pharmacy websites, but before that we see a web page displaying “WAIT 4 SECOND…” or “PLEASE WAITING 4 SECONDS…”
Play it safe by typing the domain name directly into the browser rather than clicking URLs in mails that might be forged.””
So what do you think?
domain report says
Both as a domainer and a web surfer, I think that advice is bang on! lol
Leonard Britt says
I believe it is already happening but the trend is likely to continue that fewer and fewer people will type directly into their browser bar a generic term unless they already know it is an existing site. More often than not generic search term .COM domains are parked sites and people are becoming accustomed to the look and feel of a parked page – in general a turnoff. So they will migrate to searching in Google, Yahoo, Bing for whatever it is they want. Then what effect does that have on the price gap between .COM & .Net?
BusinessWebsites.com says
Hopefully it will.
On another note it’s a bit shocking that a so called leader in Internet Security does not have technology to fix the problem. It just seems a bit backwards, not to say I don’t like it.
FX says
Google with its tool bars and browser partnerships has spent millions trying to force users not to use the address bar. The current trend is gonna be hard to reverse especially cuz now address bars require few extra clicks to navigate vs few years ago.
mike, whats the link to this article ?
MHB says
FX
http://www.trustedsource.org/blog/437/You-Name-ItSpammers-Have-Faked-It
sc says
Back to basics. Direct Nav started the Internet and will always be the way to go straight to what is real.
Search engines have become shopping guides and the SERPs are gerrymandered for that purpose.
just sayin…
domo sapiens says
As a rule of thumb people with crappie domains or domains with NO type-ins downplay parked domains/pages which provide an excelent service filling a surfer’s “need a moment in time” , Generic domains (Mainly product and services) enjoy excelent CTRs and depending on the sector excelent RPM’s as well , more so with time as parked pages get better both on relation of Geo-service and smarter optimizers…and this CAN’T be said about SE’ traffic which generally speaking have “accidental visitors” as the bulk of the traffic, the proof resides in the CTR and advertisers’ bids , such advertisers love the conversion of quality parked pages. (don’t forget advertisers can always opt-out parked pages)
In re: to type-in traffic… in my own experience I can honestly say it hasn’t decreased ( in a year to year basis) although I feel is reaching a “plateau” for most of my domains , however as some of the ” DotCom’ die hards” here well know : when people develop the .net or the c.c (country code) version of your domain beautiful things happen, traffic increases in direct relation to the other site’s popularity and the chance of selling the name also gets better (call it the “Traffic Hemorrage factor”)…
Lastly mini-crappie-one-page-sites pseudo-developers keep on counting BOT’s as real vistors…they are only fooling themselves.
jblack says
Makes sense except their very own McAfee corporate security program categorizes parked domains along with suspicious, phishing, virus sites, etc and blocks them depending on settings. The default and catch all settings though prevent parked pages from resolving and thus do not appear to the user who typed the generic name into the browser contrary to their newly stated recommendation. Obviously, that will and does decrease clicks originally intended by the user.
They need to better align their recommendation with their very own security software settings. Left and right hands clearly not talking to each other.
GenericGene says
Generics will dominate the net –
stewart says
I think most people are just too lazy to ever take the time to do it the way Mc suggests.
The rest arent listening and of course after that? They are going to be victims.