Phishing; Examples and prevention methods

Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.



Below are two examples of phishing email from ebay which serve different functions.



This genuine looking email is a masquerade. As soon as you clicked on “respond”, you were directed to an exact clone of eBay and your personal information was stolen. These messages come in different styles and writings.

This whole email was actually an image which referred you to a scam website if you clicked anywhere on it. Your mouse cursor changed to a “hand”, if you have this set as default when you point over a link.

Despite all these phishing examples, there are also ways to prevent getting scammed.

The first step to avoid being phished is to not trust emails sent to us that requests personal information especially financial information. Normally, phishers will include upsetting or exciting statements in order to trigger our fear or happiness so that we will react immediately after receiving the email. They may falsely claim suspicious withdrawals from your bank account by telling us we are the winner of a lottery. Therefore, to avoid being phished, we must never give out our account information to other parties before checking and reporting the incident with the bank or actual company that have sent you the email.

Secondly, we must ensure the website we are using to submit our credit card or other sensitive information is secure. To ensure the website is an encrypted secured website, we must check the beginning of the web address in the browser address bar is showing “https://” rather than just “http://”. Other than that, a small chain will also show in your browser if a secured website is used. However, we must be aware that phishers can get us to enter their own website and create a “secure link” for us to provide all the information they need. They can also spoof the windows explorer to show exactly what they want by putting a window on top of the other, covering the real URL.

Another way to avoid being phished is also by regularly logging into your online accounts. Having a healthy control over your accounts is normal good conduct. It is important that we should regularly check our bank, credit and debit cards to ensure that all transactions are legitimate. If anything suspicious is observed, we should contact our bank and all card issuers as soon as possible. The Microsoft Internet Explorer browser has several security holes exploited by phishing attacks. We can download the security patches at the Microsoft Security home page, http://www.microsoft.com/security/ .

Lastly, we can always lend a helping hand to stop phishing by reporting “phishing attacks” or either “spoofed” e-mails to several groups. First of all, we can forward the email to reportphishing@antiphishing.com or either to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov. Other than that, we can also forward the email to the “abuse” email address at the company that is being spoofed, for example, spoof@ebay.com”. When forwarding spoofed messages, we must always include the entire original email with its original header information intact. Another option is to notify the Internet Fraud Complaint Centre of the FBI by filling a complaint on their website, www.ifccfbi.gov/.