phishing prevention

Phishing Prevention - Guide on Phishing

Phishing Prevention guidelines will not only help you to avoid phishing, but will also explain phishing in lay man terms. When online fraudsters discovered that most of the online users have started taking computer safety measures, they reverted to age old practice to scam online community via phishing. Phishing prevention article will help you to stay away from those scams and prevent identity theft. This article consist of:

So what is phishing? It’s an automated form of social engineering, criminals use the Internet to fraudulentlyextract sensitive information from businesses and individuals, often by impersonating legitimate web sites. The potential for high rewards (e.g., through access to bank accounts and credit card numbers), the ease of sending forged email messages impersonating legitimate authorities, and the difficulty law enforcement has in pursuing the criminals has resulted in a surge of phishing attacks: estimates suggest that phishing affected 1.2 million U.S. citizens and cost businesses billions of dollars in 2004 alone.

Most of the time phishing attacks occur through e-mails. Emails are designed to resemble as they’ve generated from a legitimate businesses such as financial institutions, government agencies etc.... This phishing emails contains a link, and upon clicking that link, the recipient is taken to a website that looks exactly like the real and legitimate website. Even the Internet browser window that opens the site contains what looks to be true Internet address (URL) of a legitimate business. For example, there was an email circulated around 2004 time frame appearing to come from a leading Canadian financial institution asking recipients to enter their client card numbers. The reason given that the financial institution itself were having information technology problem. It turned out that this email was not sent by that financial institution, it was an attempt by criminals to gather financial information of the users.

Now let's come to phishing prevention guidelines.

Don't click

If you are serious on implementing phishing prevention guidelines then make sure that you do not click the link that comes through an e-mail. Recently, I received an email whose content are as follows:

“We recorded a payment request from "-shopsafe.com-" to enable the charge of $ 95.73 on your account.

Because the order was made from an european internet address, we put an Exception Payment on transaction id #PayPal-m37321 motivated by our Tracking System.

This payment is pending for the moment, if you didn't make this payment and would like to decline:

>>> Click here <<<

If you made this transaction or if you just authorize this payment, please ignore or remove this email message. The transaction will be shown on your monthly statement .

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.PayPal Inc.Payments Department.”

Of course the above mentioned email was a scam, and I did report to pay pal which they acknowledged and pledge to take further notice. The lesson derived from the above story is is that unless you are more than 100 percent certain, don't click links in e-mail.

Take Spyware Prevention measures

Make sure that you take all the spyware prevention measures. Here is a guideline on how to prevent spyware.

Stopzilla Anti-Spyware Review

Use Firefox and IE Phishing Filter

Both Firefox and IE 7.0 have phishing filters that check for sites trying to steal your information. They can be set by implementing following steps:

For Firefox: In Firefox Options, visit the Security tab, check the box next to "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery," and then check the second button for "Check by asking Google" to get up-to-date phish listings.

For IE 7: In Internet Explorer 7, go to Tools menu, and select Phishing Filter. Beware IE6 users, phishing tool does not come in IE 6, but you can install the Windows Live Toolbar and the Windows Live OneCare Advisor to battle against phishing.

Beware of pop-ups

Next on phishing prevention is to know that pop-ups in one of the way for online fraudsters to creep a spyware in your computer. They usually come up with a message indicating that your computer is infected by a spyware, and provide a link that will suppose to eliminate those spyware. This technique is also known as .

Beware of greeting frauds

Believe it or not, there are many greeting sites that collect information from both the sender and the receiver. Always stick to reputable companies such as Hallmark.

Get third party filters

It’s recommended not to rely on phishing filters provided by the browsers only. There are many good phishing filters available that are more robust and dependable.

I sincerely hope that by reading phishing prevention guidelines you will able to take more concrete steps on becoming part of phishing scam.

Retun From Phishing Prevention To Internet Safety Home Page

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