IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

In a previous post about not runing anti virus, I mentioned that you shouldn’t go to shady, possibly suspect sites.  Well, how do you determine one?  I am by no means the guru on this, a lot of it is gut feel.  Recently I had to get a replacement battery for a laptop for a friend of mine.  I was trying to locate one at a decent price and I turned up with a page that was not looking very professional.  The page was supposedly for a local shop somewhere in USA that also sold its stuff online, so it looked like an in-house web job by a programmer that doesn’t know much about Web Interfaces.  That’s okay, the site worked alright and I was able to find what I thought I needed.  But I was suspect that it just might have been a phishing or identifty-theft site.  So, operating under the assumption that scam sites are usually short-lived and don’t have any history to them, I looked it up.  There’s an archiving project for the Internet called the Way Back Machine by the folks at The Internet Archive (which I learned about from listening to The Tech Guy – not for this purpose but because they were talking about some changes coming in copyright laws.).  I checked what the site looked like a few years ago, and I figured if it were truly a phishing/scam site it would not have existing then, or if it did it would have been very different.  Anyhow, the site I was looking at had a long history of promoting the exact same thing.  Also a quick Google search on the site address with “scam” turned up nothing.  Just in case, I also put in the company’s name.  It all appeared to be legit.

This isn’t the end-all guide to checking the credibility of a website, but give it a shot if you come into something you question.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Adventures in IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.