An examination of nearly 2.5 million Web pages at some of the Internet’s most popular and trusted sites turned up at least 128,000 links that could be manipulated by fraudsters and virus writers to make online scams more believable, a study released this month found. Scammers and phishers are taking advantage of commonly used coding used in “redirects” to divert traffic from reputable Web site to sites that could harbor malicious software or phishing schemes. Redirects aren’t all bad. In essence, they are Web links that are used to forward traffic from one site to another. They can be useful when Web site owners want to move content around and don’t want old links leading to dead pages. Redirects can help selectively re-route traffic: For instance, www.example.com may want to forward any requests for a specific Web page to a third-party site. In addition, well-known companies use redirects to forward