My brush with ɢoogle.com
So today I saw something really creepy. It freaked me out at first because I couldn’t make sense of it. In my analytic account, there was an entry for traffic from this involving the following URL.
Secret.ɢoogle.com
The only problem is, that URL goes not belong to google, nor does it take you to an official google site. It took me a few minutes before I realized what the problem was.
ɢoogle.com -> Fake Site
google.com -> Real site
You see that first G? Doesn’t it look a little small? Well that’s because it’s NOT a G. Someone already explained it better so I’ll quote them
The Imitation G
In fact, the letter ‘G’ is a Latin Letter Small Capital, Unicode 0262. Compared side by side with a real capital G, they would look like ‘ɢ G’ — see the difference? Notice how the ‘G’ in the image is the same size as the lowercase letter ‘o’? It’s not the G you thought it was.
Here’s a secret: ɢoogle.com is not google.com
The more I researched on this issue, the scarier it became. I mean right now, what tipped me off that this wasn’t the normal google was the shoddy quality of the site. But imagine if the hacker had put more effort into duplicating the look and feel of google. I could have been none the wiser, they could have made a site that steals my logic credentials for my google account, which is bad. Very bad.
Well, someone, somewhere, gave out the domain ɢoogle.com to someone who was not representing google.com. what is stopping them from mimicking YOUR web site, or YOUR BANK’s website, and then leaving innocent-looking links for you to fall prey to? You would probably never realize what you did until it was too late.
Here’s a secret: ɢoogle.com is not google.com
Yikes!
If you want more details about this issue I would recommend that you check out the following links.
The internet is a scary place, stay safe, question everything, and if anything feels off, even if it’s just a gut feeling, do extra research. You never know how these hackers will be stealing your data tomorrow.