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Social Media Awareness: Discord Link Embeds to Fake Websites

Samuel Cork

Discord, the popular messaging app has a feature that allows users to embed links into messages. Embedding a link in a message looks like this. Basically it uses normal text, and makes it clickable. It is very commonly used for websites for quickly linking to different sources.


However, Discord has users who use this feature for phishing attempts. You may think "Obviously I can tell it is a link" but that is not the issue. The issue is faking the link sent so the user believes the link leads to another location.


Screenshot of Discord Link Embed

Screenshot of Link Embed to Different Website

The image above shows a test message. You can see it says youtube.com however it is linking here to this website cybercorks.com. This can be done with any website or sent to any website to trick unaware users. Hackers will use this method to trick users to be sent to a fake website that looks like steam or even discord. These website will try to convince you to log in, and that is when they attempt to steal your login credentials to access your account.






Safety Precautions

Screenshot of discord warning popup

Good news is that Discord gives warnings for links that lead outside their platform. Make sure to review these popups as they may alert you to a fake website. You can see in the image above that even though the YouTube link was clicked, the popup shows the real website address.


Another method is to copy the embedded link to see what is says.

Screenshot of how discord link embed works

Here it can be seen that copying the text and pasting it in the chat box gives a preview on what the message looks like. This is also how links are embedded into discord messages.


Learn more about phishing here.




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