Phishing: Examples and its prevention methods

The meaning of Phishing:
Phishing is a crimeware technique used to steal the identity of a target company to get the identities of its customers. While crimeware is software designed to infect a computer and take personal information that can be used to steal from the computer user. In other words, phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out “legitimate-looking” email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients.

Usually, these massages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites in order to ask for individual’s personal and sensitive information such as the bank account number, username & password, and others security number. Fraudsters and scammers like to use reputable organizations such as May Bank, Citibank, and Trusted Bank. Besides, most of the phishing web sites have the “link” and it always request recipient to click on the link in order to bring the user to another web site. Although the URL of the fraudster’s webpage appears to be true, it actually links to a fraudster/phisher’s webpage.


Examples of Phishing:
http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/examples/phishing_visa_mastercard.html

http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/examples/phishing_hsbc.html

http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/examples/bankofscotland_phishing.html


http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/examples/phishing_nab.html



http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/examples/phishing_rbs.html

other examples:
http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/phishing_examples.html
http://www.antiphishing.org/consumer_recs.html

How to avoid Phishing Scams:

First and foremost, use common sense. Fraudsters are very effective at pretending to be companies, people and even government that they’re not. Therefore, individual have to carefully determine who you’re dealing with. For example, if a promise sounds too good to be true, it probably is a fraud.

Second, never give personal information to a stranger who contacts you by emails or phone or other means. Never agree to anything without researching the facts. No matter how urgent the fraudsters claim the deal is, for safety purpose you yourself should call up the legitimate company for verification and confirmation. Don’t use the links in an email, instant message to get to any web page.

Third, avoid filling up forms in email messages that ask for personal or sensitive information if you suspect the message might not be authentic or you don’t know the sender. Always ensure that you’re using a secure website when submitting your personal or sensitive information via Web browser.

For more information about how to avoid phishing, please log on to:
http://www.antiphishing.org/consumer_recs.html
http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs17a.htm
http://www.antiphishing.org/DOJ_Special_Report_On_Phishing_Mar04.pdf