We love what we do and we love you guys here at Guerillatron.  Usually I write reviews and features dealing with something I love, video games.  Recently something else I have a passion for was thrust into the VG world.  Cyber security.  I wrote a piece covering the last cyber fiasco.  Today, I'm writing a piece to inform our readership.  To empower yourselves to be able to judge an e-mails authenticity.  Since e-mail addresses were stolen in the first data breach you can almost expect to receive phishing e-mails.

The easiest ones to catch have what I like to call shady links in them. The link may say one site but actually take you to another.  You want official addresses in the URL.  It's also possible to actually trace down the source of an e-mail if you want to get all Batman and LA Noire about it.
The first thing you need to track an internet address' source down is part of the URL.  For our example I'm going to investigate the URL found when clicking on a reset password button in an e-mail supposedly from  Sony.  Is this the real deal or a scam?

The URL is located in the address bar of your browser. You want to copy the address after https:// and stop at the end of.com.  Now you open a command prompt window (Windows key and R, then type cmd and hit enter.) Type ping then hit the spacebar  in the command prompt window.  Paste the earlier mentioned address into the black box by right clicking and selecting paste.  It should look something like this:

Hitting enter will give us the following results

Now we have the ip address of the site.  Now to authenticate.  Is it Sony or some yodel looking to steal accounts?  You should start off by searching the north American records. For this example we'll type: 199.108.0.162 in the search box, hit enter.  We get some results.  Detective work is dope!:

I have highlighted the relevant information in the network portion. Here we see who owns the address and how long they have owned it.  SOE.  Eureka!  Looks like a legit e-mail. The link points to a server on Sony's Network.  The organization results show more information that can be verified with other sources to corroborate the data.  You can check the street address on Google maps and verify it's existence via satellite photos!  Needless to say the information is correct and this is from Sony. 
Now go forth and help in the fight against cyber crime!  If you receive a phishing e-mail you can mark it as such in most e-mail applications.  This reports them and allows phishing blockers to block them via rule based detection.  Most importantly inform friends and family that may have been a part of the data breaches.

Thanks for reading and keep checking back.  You never know what we'll cover next.   Guerillatron, it only does everything!  Be sure to check out our Pirates of the Caribbean review, it's hot off the presses!