Ah, The Internet! Little packets of data moving unassumingly along a vast information highway. Depending on how we access the information, we are shuttled along a pre-determined path along the busy info roads, taking one fork or the other to reach our destination. Now Imagine this what if someone tampered with the way we reach the destination itself. Normally, we don’t think twice about using a popular search engine like Google to illuminate the paths we can take, but the keen eyes over at The Next Web noticed something peculiar, one of the domains in the Google Analytics of the site was prompting a vote for Trump! Now spam like this isn’t something that is uncommon, what was weird was the domain itself. The domain name that showed up was: ɢoogle.com
Notice the difference? The keen eyed among you must have figured out that the ‘G’ used in the domain is a smaller version of the capital ‘G’ that Google uses in theirs. Per The Next Web, The smaller G is a Unicode character used for the Latin small capital G. This is a common practice among spammers which is used to bait people into visiting websites they might otherwise avoid. These domains are especially tricky for those users, who will unknowingly or mistakenly type the domain name in their web browser and Poof! Off they go rolling uncontrollably along the side of a data hill, they had no business being in.
What is the end goal of all this Domain trickery? Well, other than a possible vote for Trump, most spam pages’ bait people to increase the traffic generated on the page, this is in turn serves as Clickbait, the other major offender of the internet. These sites are also likely to have a fair share of Malware, so a PC without a decent security solution is vulnerable.
Now, granted we have made all of this out to be quite Melodramatic. So, it’s only fair that if you find yourself in a pickle, we should tell you how to rescue yourself. Google has detailed instructions on what to do, if you want to purge this fake ‘G’, find them here.
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