What is a Phishing?

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What is a Phishing?

Phishing (pronounced "fishing") is derived due to the fact that scammers utilize several sophisticated methods to “fish” for an individual’s personal information other sensitive data. The bait they use are emails which entice an individual to give up personal information about themselves.

Phishing is one of today’s main threats in the World Wide Web and thousands of people have been victims of phishing scams every year. Phishing is an email fraud where the scammer or phisher sends out legitimate looking emails (the bait) which appear to come from trustworthy sources such as banks, financial institution, or trusted business. Most phishing mails ask the receiver to update his/her personal information usually express to the user some critical need to update an account immediately, e.g. "You're Ebay accont will close without this update!" The aim behind sending phishing email is to steal the personal and financial information from the person who receives the mail.

Phishing emails have tricked thousands of internet users who have provided their sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, bank account details, social security numbers, ATM pin number, and mother’s maiden name, to the phisher. They do so thinking the email arrived from a trustworthy sources. Firewalls or antivirus programs do not block these phishing emails as they to not carry suspect (virus) code. Spam filters also do not catch these mails as it appears to come from trustful or legitimate sources. Websites which are most frequently spoofed by phishers’ include PayPal, America Online, eBay, MSN, and BestBuy.

Phishing emails generally come with a link and when the recipient clicks on it he or she will be lead to website designed similar to an official looking website of the relevant bank or trusted business. The fraudulent website is designed in such a way that almost all the website details will be mimicked by the scam artists. Even the small details such as submenu titles, disclaimer, copyright notices will look similar like the original website. This makes the scam mail receiver think that the website is an original one. And whenever the recipient update his/her personal information in the website and hit the submit button, all the information entered by the recipient will be send to the scammer or phisher.

However, in most cases the website address of the fake site can reveal the fraud. Most of the scam artists try to deceive the individuals by substituting similar looking characters in the spellings of their fraudulent website. It is seen that majority of the phishers make use of the numeral one (1) to replace the lower case character “L”. For example, phishers have used “paypa1.com” instead of “paypal.com”. Phishers also tend to use a numerical IP address to hide the fact that the link shown in the scam mail is leading the user into a fraudulent website.

Tips to prevent phishing scams

One of the most efficient methods to prevent phishing emails is to be careful while you get any such email messages. It is highly recommended not to provide any personal information whenever you receive any such email message.

If you get any email asking you to update your personal information – such as bank account details, credit card number verification, passwords, social security numbers, ATM pin number – try not to click on any links provided in the email body.

If you think that the mail is an original official mail and not a scam mail, then it is a good idea to check the respective organizations website to make sure that they have mentioned about updating any information.

Check for any mistakes in the links URL or the organization’s website. If it is a scam mail then it is sure that the URL will have some spelling changes.

Most of the websites which deals with money transferring or online shopping must use secure transactions. Hence check for the “lock” icon on your browser’s status bar when the page is loaded. This ensures that the information you are sending to the website is secure during transmission.

If you think you have mistakenly supplied any information for a fraudulent website, contact your bank and credit card issuer without any delay.