Obscuring Your URL
Obscuring Your URL
Futility | 12578 Reads | ———Intro–––––––– Have you ever clicked on a link that looked something like: http://www.FREEXXXHERECLICKHERE@1089058664/ and were surprised by the utter and complete lack of…movies? Well this article will tell you everything you need to know about how spammers/hackers/phishers/anyone can obscure their URL beyond recognition.
———Purpose––––––– But Futility, why would anyone want to make their URL look different? Well I'm glad you asked. Obscuring your URL could come in handy in loads of different cases. Whether you want to play a harmless prank on your friend, or lead him unexpectedly to any site you wish. Think of it this way… would anyone want to go to www.letmestealyourpassword.com? No, but doesn't www.google.com@letmestealyourpassword.com seem a little more inviting? (Note: you can change the letmestealyourpassword part once you have an IP address. More on that later.) You can also use some of these methods to get past blocks that your school may have put up to stop you from accessing 'bad' sites.
———––The @ sign–––––––––– For this article we are going to consider that you are trying to trick a long-time Yahoo enthusiast to go to the best search engine int the world (google). You may have noticed a prime example of obscuring in the preceding examples. The '@' can be used to confuse people. Anything that is placed in front of it, gets ignored. So, if what I said was true, www.yahoo.com@google.com would bring you to google.com. Try it, I dare you. But, that's not very sneaky, considering if you saw www.yahoo.com@stealmypassword.com you probably wouldn't click on it, no matter how much you like yahoo. This brings me to my next point.
———––IP Address—————
Most people already know this, but you can use the IP address to access a site. So typing in 64.233.167.147
would bring you to google.com. A quick and easy way to get the IP of a site would be going into your command
prompt (type in cmd.exe into run for Windows users) and type in ping www.google.com (or any other website).
Your computer will ping the site, and you will see the IP. So as of right now, we could type in this:
and lure unsuspecting users to our site. (In this case, google.com)
———––Dword–––––––––––
But what if this is not enough? What if we are talking about a smart guy, who is willing to check out the IP to see where he's
going? What if he's determined to get to yahoo by clicking your link, no matter what? Well, we can obscure the IP address further still.
This is called its Dword form. This can get a little bit complicated, so try to stay with me. As an example,
we're once again going to use google's IP (64.233.167.147). Open your calculator (I'm using the normal calc.exe) and type this:
64*256+233=*256+167=*256+147
In case you didn't notice, the numbers (other than 256) are the first, second, third, and fourth numbers of the IP. Now all you have to do is type the answer into the URL, and you'll get the site you're looking for. So now we could get our obscured URL looking like this:
www.yahoo.com@1089054611
If you don't want the yahoo at the beginning you could even just put:
1089054611
and set it as a hyperlink that will take the person that clicks it to your site.
This brings my article to a close. Thanks for reading and please, if you're going to criticize, the least you can do is make it constructive.
