Phishing

Definition

Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire confidential information such as username, passwords and credit card detail by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Phishing is carried out by e-mail or instant messaging which the email request the users to update their personal information. Its' look are almost identical like legitimate but actually it is fake and set up to steal the user’s private information. Normally, phishing will appear in popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators such as PayPal, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, BestBuy, and America Online and so on.

A Few Examples of Phishing

eBay Phishing Example

Ebay/PayPal phishing is very common currently. A scammer will send out thousands or even millions of emails to his list. Once the end user click on the links in the e-mail ,it will link to a web site that designed like ebay. Next, the end user attempts to login his or her username and password to the scammer. Further, the scammer also e-mails to his list and claiming to be eBay or PayPal and request your username and password. The novice user may send those details back to the address and their account is compromised.To prevent this problems, the users do not reply or click any e-mail and links that claimed themselves as Ebay or Paypal.In fact, Ebay or PayPal website will never ask their users for personal information.

Bank Phishing Example

The scammer will send out phishing e-mails to bank users and claims that the recipients account has been suspended and in order to return their account to normal standing they need to verify some information. The users will clicks on the link and submit their information to scammer. Then, the scammer will use the information to operate the victims account.

To prevent the problem, the users do not click or reply any e-mail and link which it is claiming to be from bank. As this is a pretty common occurrence you should be able to just ignore it.

The other fraudulent ways is included the followings:

E-mail

Phone Phishing

Credit Card Phishing

Prevention of Phishing

There are few ways to solve the phishing such as do not reply or accept any unauthorized e-mail or messages. Besides, you can install the anti-virus to block any unauthorized mails. For more details about any software to solve phishing, you can refer to website like wikipedia, google, and so on.

Anti-Phishing Program

Article of Prevention Phishing

Type of Prevention Phishing

Prevention of Phishing

How to Safeguard Our Personal and Financial Data

Try to imagine this illustration: You love to do online shopping. Usually you will log in as member and use credit card for payment of the product. Recently you heard your friend said the website that you usually log in as member to do online shopping is being hacked by online hackers. You are so worried that your personal data would be stolen, especially your password that you use for logging in. This illustration fully described the importance of safeguarding for computer users nowadays. There are more and more people using computers to carry out their daily work, even companies make use of computers to do their ordinary business transactions. Therefore, online security is crucial in today's world to safeguard our personal and financial data.

There is some suggestions to protect your personal and financial data:

1. Install a firewall
Firewall referred to a system that is responsible to block unauthorized access and allowing authorized communication. Firewall act as a guard in front of our computer to block all unapproved users to log into our computer network.

Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(networking)



2. Password control
Password has to be created before access into any personal data to ensure no other one else can simply access to our data. However, the password has to be strong enough or complicated to avoid other from guessing your password correctly. Many of the website has enable users to log in using their password, however it seems not secured enough to safeguard our personal and financial data. This is just a preliminary stage in protecting our privacy. It is recommended to change password frequently as to prevent others from hacking into the data.



3. Encryption
Some information that are private and confidential should be encrypted. Encryption enable readable data to convert into unreadable characteristic so that others unable to read the data. It is a useful method to prevent others from stealing private data from the computer.



4. Do not access financial information publicly
Please avoid to access personal financial account when using public wireless or at public computer. Public wireless or computer not like our own personal computer, they are more easier to hacked by others.



5. Install antivirus or antispyware programs

This is the most common way to protect your data. Every personal computer should have one antivirus program to ensure clean file or information saved in computers. Norton, AVG or other antivirus sofware could help you to avoid viruses and attacked by intruders. In an addition, it is important to update your antivirus programs frequently.




6. Do not access to unknown site or download unknown file
It is essential to have knowledge that all unknown site or file might contained viruses. Therefore, please do not simply access to it as once you clicked on it, there will be a chance for the intruders. Besides, any pop-out that appeared on the screen should be ignored.