Understanding Domain Name - Protect Yourself from Hackers

Are you able to tell the difference between the two? If someone send you a link like the bottom one, with some 'convincing' images, would you click it?

I hope you can. And it is quite obvious. Let's understand what is domain name.

"A domain name is a unique name that identifies an internet resource such as a website." - Wikipedia.org

Let's make it simpler to understand. When we go to Facebook or Google, we type "facebook.com" or "google.com", or this blogspot in "blogspot.com". These are all domain name, which identifies the website. When you type "google.com" on the URL bar and hit enter, the next thing you will see is only the Google logo, with a search bar, and some buttons that you always see. You can't go anywhere else.

That's how domain name works, it will only bring us to one specific website. Let's see the more detail part.

We split the URL into three parts.

|www|.whatsapp|.com|

We can think of URL as a filesystem. When we go into C: drive, and navigate to "Documents/My Pictures", our address bar would show "C:/Documents/My Pictures/". Same thing for URL, but it is read in reverse way. It's read from behind, where .com is the top-level domain, and .whatsapp is the domain name that uniquely identifies the website, that is inside .com "folder". Lastly, we come to www, which is the abbreviation of World-Wide-Web. In our article, we just treat it as a "general folder" which contain all the files inside the "whatsapp".

So, what is the "whatsapp.dovelane.com" thing? Let's split it up again:

|whatsapp|.dovelane|.com|

What you see here is the domain name, instead of ".whatsapp", it is ".dovelane". See the thing here? You are not in the real whatsapp website! Unless you know who creates this "dovelane.com", don't simply go inside and click anything!

But, what's the "whatsapp" thing in the URL? As like in the filesystem, this "whatsapp" is a sub-domain, or "sub-folder" of dovelane.com. It is potentially a fraudulent website, which is trying to fool people around.

P/S: The reason I take "whatsapp" as an example in this article is due to the fraud happened. Read my post on Whatsapp Update Scam!

Please stay tune, I will talk more technical thing about domain name in future.