Phishing : examples and its prevention methods

What is phishing?
Phishing is considered a scam which an attacker uses various of ways to entice you into divulging personal information such as social security number, account usernames and other personal information. Phishing schemes typically come either in email where the attacker will send victims an email purporting to be from a valid business. The email will attempt to coerce the intended victim into visiting a fraudulent website and entering their personal information. The information is then surreptitiously sent to the attacker who then uses it to engage in illegal purposes.

Examples of phishing:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/advice/Phishing-email.asp





http://antivirus.about.com/od/emailscams/ss/phishing_7.htm


How to prevent phishing?

While these attacks are always changing and becoming more sophisticated, thus following are the few methods that can help in protecting people from phishing scams.
· Do not respond to request for any personal or financial information through email. Most legitimate businesses will never ask for passwords, credit card numbers, or other personal information in an email. So you should be able to reject this kind of email if there is an email where requesting the relevant kind of information. However, you can contact the company to verify the legitimacy of the request if you are in any doubt.
· Visit website by typing the URL into your address bar. If you want to check the institution’s website, do so by typing the address into your web browser rather than clicking a link in email. You must be careful as even the address bar displays the correct address, because there are several ways for hackers to display a fake URL in the address bar on your browser.
· Review your credit card and statement routinely. There is no guarantee regard from this as you may still become a victim of identity theft. Due to this situation, the effective way you should take is check credit card and bank statement at least monthly to stop the attacker before they cause significant damages.
· Report suspected of personal information to proper authorities. You must immediate to report the scam to the company that’s being spoofed. Visiting the company's Web site to get the correct contact information and the company may have a special e-mail address to report such abuse.