Hello everyone! Hope you’re all doing well!

While I was doing some learning and going through the Internet Safety course, I landed on the “Phishing attacks” article (https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computers-and-internet/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:online-data-security/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:cyber-attacks/a/phishing-attacks) from another article (“Strong passwords”) that linked to it. Now in the “Suspicious URL” section of this article, it features an example malicious link that it tells you to try clicking on. But when I do, it takes me to a fake Apple support website full of pop ups telling me that my iPad is infected with malware of some kind.

Even though the article states: “…You didn’t land on PayPal, did you? That’s because the text of a link isn’t the same as the destination of the link”, I still felt a bit nervous and got even more so when I read a few comments on the article saying that they might have possibly gotten a virus clicking on the example link too, but I wasn’t sure if they were actually true or if I should take them with a grain of salt. So I tried contacting Khan Academy Support to ask them if this was intentional, if the example link was supposed to send you to a website like that. This example malicious link isn’t actually malicious and wouldn’t give someone a virus or malware or anything like that, right?

Well, I got a response back from a kind staff member who told me that the example malicious link is supposed to be 100% safe and that when you click on it according to him: “…it’s only taking you to an unregistered domain that does nothing else than show you an empty screen with other related search results.” He was even nice enough to take the time to make and share a video with me of what it looked like on his end when he tried clicking the link on his iPad.

Here’s a link to the video he shared with me: https://app.screencast.com/vG4HHpCptvmdO?conversation=T39dRLNyhXW9J3ePDayJpN

When I saw this video, my stomach dropped. I didn’t end up on that website at all! I do my best to be as careful as possible when I surf the web and I know for certain that no other search I made could have caused that phony website I landed on to appear. I took a chance and tried previewing the example malicious link on a different device, on my iPhone which I don’t really use to surf the web at all, and it still didn’t take me to the same website shown in the video or even the phony website that I landed on with my iPad (not that I want to really end up on a site like that again). Believe it or not, clicking on it landed me on the front page of my local Honda Dealership’s website of all things!

The kind staff member I was speaking to suggested that I oughta post about this here in the discussion forums to see if anyone else might be having the same issue and to see if anyone might have any answers as to what’s going on here. I was doing some research and was thinking that maybe my Wi-Fi router could be infected with a virus that’s making it so that phony page pops up, but I’m not too sure… I used Sophos antivirus and did a scan on my iPad and Wi-Fi network, but it didn’t detect any issues.

Has anyone else been having the same issue too or is it just me? And please be careful if you try clicking on the example malicious link in the article to see for yourself! Don’t want anyone else to possibly get a nasty virus or anything like that if it really does turn out to be unsafe.

Here’s a link to a public Google Drive folder I made that has screenshots of the problem if it’s any help: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ac227p4LmXYhaStviTpvO2eQgP3mecuB

If you need any more info about this, please don’t hesitate to ask! Thank you all in advance for your time and help, and I look forward to reading everyone’s thoughts on this!