A nice blog post titled Safe Surfing by David Grenda offered this simple advice, "Hold your mouse over an internet link without clicking the link. A message will appear showing the true destination for the link. If they don't match, don't click it."Now this sounds like great advice as you will confirm the "true destination" for the link. Unfortunately, this is bad, bad, bad advice. Look at the following link, run the mouse over and see that the true destination is microsoft.com. Now click the link (it will open in a new window) and you should be surprised!
www.microsoft.com
Now it is extremely important to point out that this is not a trick, it is not a hack, it is done using a standard feature of html. The "window status" bar at the bottom of the browser is simply a variable that can be set by any website.
So the bottom line is that by running a mouse over the link doesn't show you the true anything, it only shows you what the website has programmed that line to read! It is only true that it will show you the true destination if the creator of the website didn't program it to do otherwise.
The danger here is that with an incorrect belief about what is displayed on the windows status bar you'll be easily tricked by the fraudsters who I believe go far displaying the "wrong" information in the window status bar.
You can add the following line to any a href tag in your html code, a mouse over of anylink in the href will show as microsoft.com. You can change the text to anything you want.
onMouseover="window.status='http://www.microsoft.com'; return true" onMouseout="window.status='';return true"
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