I like to think of The Internet as a city, of sorts. There are certain areas that everyone frequents, central hubs where all the folks online enjoy hanging out. There are centers of commerce, entertainment, interaction, and information. There’s libraries, and cafes, and arcades, and shopping centers. Just like a city, though…there are certain places you’ll want to avoid.
These are the dark alleys of the Internet. The areas of the city that everyone talks about, but no one cares to go. The twists and turns and dark corners that will swallow up the uninitiated, filled with criminals and victimizers who will readily assault anyone who enters unprepared. They are many and varied, but they all have one thing in common- they’re dangerous. For many of you, this is more or less common sense.
Still, this is information worth mentioning. And yes, while there are exceptions to each of the rules below, it’s still better to be safe than sorry, right?
Ladies and gentlemen, here are five types of links you’ll want to avoid if you’d prefer to keep your computer malware and spyware free.
“I made [X] dollars a month sitting at my computer!”
Ninety percent of the time, these links are complete and utter scams, designed to draw you in and mine cash and information from you. The other ten percent of the time, they’ll leave your computer with a few unwanted gifts when you navigate away from the page. While it’s certainly possible to make money from home and work as a freelancer- it’s what I do myself- it’s neither as easy nor as simple as they always make it out to be…and the secrets to ‘success’ certainly can’t be bought with a one-time fee.
Porn/Sex Appeal
Don’t look at me like that. It bears mentioning- most sites that host illicit media of any kind tend, by their very nature, to be particularly sketchy. There’s a good change that navigating to one such website- and particularly clicking a link to “meet sexy singles,” or any garbage of the sort- will leave your computer infested with a stack of tracking cookies and possibly even a few pieces of malware, for good measure. And as for those of you lonely fellows who think those “women want to meet you” banners are legitimate websites?
They’re not. The pictures they use are stock photos.
Get Free Stuff!
Nothing in life is ever free. That’s a good rule to live by. Know that somewhere, someone is either paying for a product you use, or making a profit off the fact that you use a product. A website that claims to offer you free anything (aside from a free trial) is more than likely a scam. The exception, of course, lies with open-source products and operating systems, and “free to play” games (which, as we all know, aren’t EXACTLY one hundred percent free). Everything else that purports to give you something for nothing simply doesn’t hold water.
Emulation:
Again, I’m aware that there are many exceptions to this rule, but the very nature of roms and emulators (mostly illegal) means that the sites on which they’re hosted tend to be rather suspicious, more often than not. If you’re still dead-set on downloading some, best make sure you’ve got some pretty hefty security at your back- you’ll likely need it.
Sketchy Torrents
Or really, any download site. There’s a great many torrent sites that, when you search for something, will offer you a bunch of ‘junk’ results that contain the keywords…and a file that doesn’t look like it’s related at all to what you’re looking for. Downloading that file’s a guaranteed virus- and the appearance of such search results means the torrent site your own is more than likely bad for your system.
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