P.H.I.S.H.I.N.G!!

Phishing?? Do you guys know what Phishing is? Phishing is not a new issue and it is a type of scam that has been around for years. Perpetrator will send out a legitimate-looking email in an attempt to ask for personal information such as phone number, password, credit card detail and so on. Well known and trustworthy web sites including eBay, Yahoo, Paypal, Best Buy, online bank are often spoofed by phishers to get the victim. One example of phishing is customer of eBay received an email that required them to re-register themselves by providing credit card data, date of birth and so on. The page looked just like eBay’s homepage and contains all the eBay internal links but did not really belong to eBay. Besides that, Citibank has also been disguise by the phishers to get the important information from the victim. One can visit this website: http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/advice/Phishing-email.asp to have a look of the fake website.
How to avoid being hooked by these phishers?
Legitimate businesses and financial institutions would hardly ever ask for personal information via e-mail. If you receive such a request, call the relevant organization using a telephone number that you know to be genuine and ask whether it is true. Besides that, one should check the legitimacy of the web site by open a new internet browser session and type in the company web address by their own rather than click on the link in the message or cut and paste the link from the message as the phishers will lead you to a different website. Hence, look carefully at the URL that led you to a web site. The longer the URL, the easier it is to conceal the true destination address. For instance, web address like http://www.superstarcompany.com@thisisascam.com actually sends the user to “thisisascam.com” rather than the page of superstarcompany. Furthermore, another ways to masquerade URL include substituting similar-looking characters such as substitute the o with zero, spoofed paypal.com as paypa1.com. In addition, some phishing emails contain software that can harm the user computer or track the activities on the internet without the user knowledge. Anti-virus software, anti-spyware software and firewall can be used to protect the user from inadvertently accepting the unwanted files. Anti-virus scans the incoming files while the firewall helps to make the user invisible on the internet and blocks all file from unauthorized sources. On the other hand, phishing and Malware protection helps to check the website visited by the user against the lists of reporting phishing and malware sites. However, all of this software should be updated frequently in order to work efficiently. Lastly, check for the spelling mistake and bad grammar in the website. It is acceptable for an occasional error slip by any organization but if more than one mistake will be represent as a signal to be aware.
In short, one should learn to be alert and don’t become the fish of the phishers!!