What Is Phishing and How To Avoid It

Written by OSAblog on Monday, June 15th, 2009

Phishing is a criminally fraudulent process made in attempt to scam an Internet user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. It is usually made through email. Phishing is a lucrative computer crime which is growing rapidly in the last few years. The best way to protect against phishing is to know how to recognize it.

How Does Phishing Work?

Phishing is usually made by email or IM. You will receive a message that may appear to be from a friend, a business, a government agency or some other legitimate entity. For example, a lot of phishing messages appear to be from credit card companies or banks. Some appear to be from major online retailers, such as, Amazon, ebay and PayPal. Some will be from organizations or companies you have never dealt with before so they will be easier for you to detect.

A phishing message may state that the company or organization it has been sent from has data problems and your private information needs verification. The message usually has a link that you are supposed to click on in order to validate your private information. When you click on that link you will be directed to a fake website that resembles the original website that the phishing message pretends to be from. Phishers will do anything in order to convince you that you are in a legitimate website. They will have a similar URL as the original website and the appearance of the fake website will be identical to the original one. You will be asked to enter your personal details, most likley in a popup window. These details may include your credit card number and password, your account details and password etc. When you enter your personal information phishers will harvest your data and exploit it. They may drain your account immediately or sell your personal information to someone else. A phishing message could also have an attachment that when clicked on infects your PC with malware.

How to Detect a Phishing Message

Most important is to remember that legitimate businesses should not ask for personal details via email or by popup window. If you encounter such an email or IM then it is probably a phishing message.
If an email asks you to “verify your information” or “confirm your user and password” then it is probably a phishing message.
If an email states consequences that will occur if you do not verify your details then it is probably a phishing message.

Avoid Becoming a Victim

When getting a phishing email, do not click on the link or the attachments that appear in the message and delete it immediately. If you are not sure that it is a phishing message open a new browser page and enter the URL of the legitimate business manually. Be aware that your PC may be infected by malware that can take over your browser requests and whenever you ask for your bank website or credit card company website it will direct your browser to a fake website in order to steal your personal information. The best precaution when getting a suspicious email is to obtain the support or customer service departments details of the legitimate business that presumably sent you the message (not by using the email or the Internet) and contact them in order to validate authenticity.

For more information on how to protect your PC and personal information go to – In3Go – Resource for Internet Security Information

Sara Moses is a systems analyst consultant with ten years of experience in the field of Information systems. For more information on Internet Security and how to protect your family on the web go to -
In3Go – Resource for Internet Security Information.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/security-articles/what-is-phishing-and-how-to-avoid-it-970848.html

Share and Enjoy:

Welcome back! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Related Posts

Discovering Dangerous Business Application Vulnerabilities Enterprise security consultants may spend their days at mid-size or large organizations; they may perform their assignments from anywhere in the world. Nevertheless, they possess a common assignment: to better manage the risks related to their organizational infrastructure. More and more, corporate Web application security plays a significant role to......
Protect yourself from all Types of Identity Theft There is no magical way to protect yourself from all types of identity theft but one of the most important keys is knowledge and common sense. If you use any online service such as online banking, ebay, paypal or anything else that could be used to access your personal details......
Removing Malware - Stop the Spy who loves your Data and Information In order to go about removing malware, you first will need to know what malware is. Basically, malware is a malicious piece of software that has been designed for no other intention than to damage or spy on your computer without your knowledge. There are several different types of malware......
Protect your PC from Infection The Web is increasingly used by white-collar criminals for fraudulent purposes. You can thwart these malicious activities by being watchful and by activating the following 5 steps to protect your computer and yourself. 1. Install anti-virus software and infection protection software. 2. Install a firewall and monitor all attempts to......
Is FixTool a Genuine Removal Tool? FixTool is a rogue security application that claims to detect and remove infections and threats from your PC. If you are familiar with these programs, you may know how they work. The security alerts that are displayed to users are designed to frighten them, so that they purchase the product.......

Related Websites

New Loan Funded — Clearing a personal credit card used for business purchases — $9,500 at 18% — A Credit — DTI 46% A new loan funded (Clearing a personal credit card used for business purchases â $9,500 at 18%).Â I participated via an automatic bid Low AMT -- Extreme DTI -- Autofunding.Â Which means this funded at less than 15K less than 60% DTI and was autofunding.Â Â The borrower hadÂ A credit and......
Credit Card Research: Eufora Prepaid MasterCard with Credit Builder. Since I get emails all the time asking about different credit cards and if people should be signing up for this, that, or the other one, this will be a new feature every week about different credit cards. This week's card is the Eufora Prepaid MasterCard with Credit Builder, which......
10 Signs that you are about to Become a Victim of Phishing Are You Being Phished? Phishing (read: 'fishing') is a term used to refer to the method used by many internet scammers and fraudsters to illegally obtain personal information from you.Â This information will include your name, passwords, user IDs, PIN numbers, credit card numbers, bank account details, and other such......
Credit Card Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Credit Score There are a number of different credit card mistakes that people routinely make that can dramatically decrease their credit score, resulting in the person appearing less credit worthy to credit card lenders.Â Most of these common mistakes are things that people would not think of affecting their credit score, but......
Pentagon wants to harvest info on social networking sites Anyone else have a major problem with this? "I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.' So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking......