A malicious website is any website that's been designed to cause harm. In this article, we'll focus on phishing websites and malware websites. A phishing website – sometimes called a “spoof” or “lookalike” website – steals your data. Phishing websites look like legitimate websites.

How can you tell if a website is malicious?

There are several services you can use to verify a link. Google Safe Browsing is a good place to start. Type in this URL followed by the site you want to check, such as google.com or an IP address. It will let you know if it has hosted malware in the past 90 days.

What happens when you go to malicious website?

Once you visit a page like this from your web browser, code is executed on your PC that redirects you to other malicious sites, downloads malware to your computer, or scrapes personal information from you.