Phishing – What is phishing?

What is phishing? – in the cyber world, phishing is a serious crime and that can be referred to as online fraud. This sin is made in the form of online attacks with the help of forged e-mails and counterfeit websites in order to obtain the confidential and sensitive information of those who are involved in online correspondence and transactions etc. In case of fake websites, these are copycat in designing and other features of any reputable organization’s original site. Such as, a bank website can be used in this concern by Phishers to prepare its copy. This technique to deceive others was expressed along with detail in the year 1987 and 1^st time on the record utilization of “phishing” was occurred in 1996.

With reference to phishing, all efforts are made with malice so to get simply finance relating information, social security and telephone numbers, credit card information, home addresses of online users. According to the most of inspections, such attacks are made using the banks and finance relating institute’s websites. Phishing scam performers are experienced in their field of deceiving others. That’s why; there are some tips to keep you aware and safe from such unauthentic and wicked tricks of fetching information. To identify either an email received from a known person or institute requiring your accounts information is legitimate or not, you need to confirm it first. You can verify the content and sender using different ways like checking the email address of mail sender, by calling to the inquiry or related staff of accounts etc.

You have to check the spellings and domain name of the sender’s email address before responding to them. Scammer can use a fake but so far alike domain name such as instead of .com, they can use .net.  So be careful, whenever you received a mail demanding your account number, credit card or other private information because rightful financial institutes never ask for such information online without offering a secure way. If certain steps are required to be taken then check first the address of site so is this a secure site with https or not.

Phishing practicing

Phishers are mostly targeting to the bank customers and other payment services that are active online for their business purposes such as E-mails from the revenue department can be used to collect highly sensitive information from any taxpayers. But for the convenience of online users, certain anti-phishing websites as “fraudwatch international” are publishing the exact messages, moving over the internet to deprive others. These sites are over and over again provided particular messages details too.

Most phishing methods are using technical deception so to make a link in the e-mail. Another way is to put together the displayed text between the <A> tag for a link.  To make the detection harder, phishers have made use of images as well. Websites forgery can also be done using javascript commands and placing original URL addresses or pictures in address bars. In another case of cross site scripting, a phisher can direct a user to log-in at his/her bank website page but in fact that link to bank site is just a fraud that is made to get the personal information.