What is Phishing ?
Like spam, phishing (fishing) is a form of unsolicited email. Although some spam may only be annoying advertising, phishing is an attempt to steal from you. Unfortunately people are falling for it.
Phishing is when email is used as a means to "fish" for information that is necessary to access financial accounts. Usually, the e-mail will appear to be from a legitimate company. It will try to entice you give them your account number and the related password. Often the email uses an explanation that the company's records need some updating, or a security procedure is being changed that require you to confirm your account in order to keep using it.
They may look like the real thing! In appearance it can be very difficult to tell that the e-mail is a fraud. Like spam, e-mail from phishers usually contains fake FROM or REPLY TO headers in the email addresses, to make the e-mail look as though it came from a legitimate company.
In addition to the spoofed FROM or REPLY TO addresses, the fake e-mail is usually HTML-based. At first glance it may appear genuine. The e-mail often contains the actual logos, and appears to have the web site addresses of the real company. I've even seen them include comments suggesting you "be careful" with your password. All of the looks and wording of the email is designed to make it appear authentic.
However, when you view the HTML (computer code inside the email), you can see that the web site addresses are disguised and clicking a link will really send you to some another location. Often, it will take you to a look-a-like site in a foreign country. These sites are opened temporarily and designed to look like the real thing, in order to entice you to enter your log-in information and secret password. Once they get the information, they will try to transfer money out of your accounts, or make charges to it.
A common practice of phishing is to include a form in the e-mail for the recipient to fill in the fields with their name, account number, passwords or PIN number.For example they might send you a phising e-gold nitification mail with the fake e-"q"old link .Sometimes people nay be cheated by this kine of link . |
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