Phishing is on the rise.  It is an ever-growing form of Internet-based fraud. The costs of phishing to financial institutions in terms of actual dollars and damage to are too significant to ignore.  In recent years there has been an explosion of these types of attacks.  For many people Phishing is still a relatively new and unknown phenomenon.

Phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information (such as usernames, passwords and credit card details) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out by email, and often directs users to enter details at a spurious website. It is one method used to perform an identity theft attack.

Phishing is big business. The good news is that prevention is not difficult. Phishing is a national and international problem on the Internet. Also, because phishing is generally considered to be very ‘easy’ a constant stream of newcomers will replace the retired phishermen. The core of phishing is that people are drawn to a website, mistakenly thinking it belongs to a company that they trust.

The term phishing is derived from the fact that Internet scammers “fish” for users’ financial information and password data. The first mention on the Internet of phishing was on the alt.2600 hacker newsgroup in January of 1996, however, the term may have been used earlier in printed materials.

Phishers may register plausible-looking domains like aolaccountupdate.com, mypaypal.net or paypa1.com (using the number 1 instead of the letter L). They may even direct their victims to a well-known company’s actual website and then collect their personal data through a faux pop-up window

Phishing e-mails can provide a link to a seemingly authentic page where you can login and reveal your username, password and other personal or confidential information.  Phishing is one of the fastest growing problems on the Internet. Hackers are continuously developing sophisticated methods to illegally obtain private information, resulting in great financial

The best protection from phishing is to take great caution with emails. Never click on links in emails that lead to online shops and banks; instead, enter the information by hand in your browser’s address field or click on the relevant entry in your browser’s list of bookmarks or favourites.

New types of phishing are on the rise.  Unlike regular phishing, where a hacker SPAMs thousands of recipients with a generic, fraudulent e-mail to trick users into divulging personally identifiable information, spear phishing is much more ingenious. These types of attacks target a specific group of people, often employees at a company, with malicious e-mails that appear to be sent from an authority or company executive. Phishing is a type of attack whose goal is to steal private information, such as login credentials or credit card numbers, usually to carry out various types of financial fraud. An attacker impersonates a trusted entity, such as a bank, government, ISP, or large web site, and tries to trick people into giving up their private information.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 3:58 am and is filed under Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.