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How not to be a fish to phishers

niranjanPosted on Posted in Email, HowTo, Network, Security, Technology, Windows

It’s very difficult to stay safe online today without understanding the security jargons.

Phishing is one of the most popular techniques used by criminals to fool the users (even quite experienced ones) in giving in their personal information.

Phishing – Fraudulent emails and pop-ups designed to fool you into revealing personal information, such as passwords, credit card details, and account numbers, for criminal gain.

Some of the latest phishing attacks in News:

Attackers use BBC Story to convince users to click on the link, then install keylogger to the users PC exploiting the latest IE Security hole.

Phishers set hidden traps on eBay, when you click on the listing, it’ll run a script that automatically takes you to a new page that requests login info.

This Australian news, How Phishing sites fools us talks about the study conducted by Harvard University and Berkeley Why Phishing works? (pdf). The study found that best phishing site was able to fool more than 90 percent of participants. The indicators that are designed to signal trustworthiness were not understood (or even noticed) by many participants.

How to protect yourself from phishing

  1. Never reply to an email or pop-up messages that ask for personal or financial information. Don’t click on the links within the message.
  2. Keep your OS and softwares up to date (specially if it’s Windows and IE)
  3. Use anti-virus, personal firewall, anti-spyware and keep them up to date.
  4. Don’t send your personal or financial information in an email.
  5. Always review your credit card and bank account statements as soon as you receive them.
  6. Take extra care while opening any attachment or downloading any files from emails.

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2 comments on “How not to be a fish to phishers”
  1. Lisa says:
    January 5, 2009 at 1:10 am

    I use primarily Mac and was wondering if we needed to be worried about viruses as well? I really haven’t heard much about viruses on macs and don’t have a virus scanner either.

  2. Niranjan Kunwar says:
    January 5, 2009 at 6:50 pm

    I’m a mac user, and don’t use any anti-virus as well. Theoretically macs can be infected by viruses, but haven’t seen anyone infected in real-life. So, until now it’s safe have a mac without anti-virus.

    Viruses are one thing, but you should be very careful about the phishing scams, no platform is immune to it.