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What Is Phishing? Well, according to legislation, phishing refers to a person or a group of cyber-criminals who create an imitation or copy of an existing legitimate Web page to trick users into providing sensitive personal information. Responding to "phishing" emails put your accounts at risk.
Usually a phishing-attack is done in combination with email spam. Spamming is simply to send millions of emails with one mouse click. This way phishers can reach a huge target population very fast. Hence it’s name, “fishing” from the big internet ocean.
The spammer doesn’t know his victim, so the emails sent out are general, impersonal, and often focused on the big popular banks or companies with a large customer base.
To increase the number of responses, cyber-criminals include upsetting or exciting statements in their emails. They want people to react immediately and respond with the desired information without thinking. To protect yourself, take the time to examine the claims made in the email. If you receive an email requesting sensitive information, check its authenticity by contacting the company that appears to be the originator of the email.
The secret is quantity. 3-5% of the recipients fall for the fraud which makes it highly lucrative.
"Phishing what does it mean?" Cyber-criminals solicit personal data from unsuspecting victims via the Internet - like personal IDs, passwords, card numbers and PINs - and sell this information to other criminals who use it for financial gain. They can also access a customer's accounts through online banking and set up false bill payments that send checks to the criminal or a conspirator. In other cases, criminals transfer funds from all available customer accounts, including credit cards, savings accounts and home equity loans into their checking account. A copy of the customer's credit card or check card is then used with their PIN at ATMs around the world to withdraw cash from their checking account.
Several examples of banks which have had their customers fooled by the phish
scams are Bank of America, US Bank, Bank of Montreal and ANZ Bank of Australia
Also other commercial institutions have been exposed, like eBay, Paypal, bestbuy.com,
Microsoft MSN and Yahoo.
All internet users are potential targets. Summer 2004, mass produced emails were sent out with the following slogan: “Support John Kerry for President, please vote and contribute!” The target audience was persons wanting to help Kerry with his president campaign. Of course they gave away their credit card number willingly!
We can all be fooled. It only takes a few minutes on a bad day. However, following a few tricks greatly reduces the risk of being a victim to the phishing scheme
Learn how to avoid phishing attacks
From " what is phishing?" back to Anti Phishing main page