Is the Internet Safe?

So I just read an article about how there's an inherent problem with the design of the DNS (Domain Name System) that makes the Internet easy to hack into. Essentially, you type an address into the Address bar, and the DNS translates that into a series of numbers (i.e. IP address) that sends you to the page you want. Well, evidently, that service is easy enough to hack so that you could be redirected to a page where someone asks for your personal information and you could be scammed.

It would be more sinister than the emails that show a link to Chase or National City but if you look at the bottom of the window, the URL shows some random site, so you just want to forward the email to support@chase.com or support@ncb.com (or whatever your bank's website says its email address is) to make them aware of the latest hoax. Here, it would look like it is sending you to the site you want, but when you get there, it's not where you should be.

So anyhow, this article includes a couple of links to sites you should visit to check if your company's dns has been hacked. Well, that just begs the question: how do you know you can trust the link? The assumption is that you're online reading this article, and npr's site has not been hacked, so that link should be fine (although maybe the article should write explicitly what the URL should read), but if you receive the article via a feed into your email, and you've been hacked, couldn't a hacker have written a program that searches for references to this scam and changes the text in the email to redirect you to his site?

Just a thought, Mr. Fox.
(sorry, that's a quote from one of my boys' books, 'My Lucky Day' by Keiko Kasza in which a pig accidentally knocks on the door of a fox's house, and, the fox is amazed at how lucky he is that his favorite dinner should just knock on his door like that. Realizing he's going to be eaten, the pig suggests that because he's so dirty, he should be cleaned first. And because he's so tiny, he should be fattened up, and that because he works so hard, his meat is tough and he should be massaged. In the end, the fox is too tired to cook him and passes out on the floor, and the pig runs off with the rest of the cookies, saying 'What a meal, what a bath, what a massage. This must be my lucky day.' It's cute and fun, and I just love that line. So just be warned that it may appear more often...