06/05/2014
What is Phising Attack?
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They ask for personal data, or direct you to websites or phone
numbers to call where they ask you to provide personal data. A
few clues can help you spot fraudulent email messages or links
within them.
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What does a phishing email message look like?
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Phishing email messages take a number of forms:
They might appear to come from your bank or financial
institution, a company you regularly do business with, such as
Microsoft , or from your social networking site.
They might appear to be from someone you in your email
address book.
They might ask you to make a phone call. Phone phishing scams
direct you to call a phone number where a person or an audio
response unit waits to take your account number, personal
identification number, password, or other valuable personal
data.
They might include official-looking logos and other identifying
information taken directly from legitimate websites, and they
might include convincing details about your personal history that
scammers found on your social networking pages.
They might include links to spoofed websites where you are
asked to enter personal information.
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Here is an example of what a phishing scam in an email message
might look like.
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Example of a phishing email message that includes threat of
account closure and malicious links designed to trick you into
entering your account information.
To make these phishing email messages look even more
legitimate, the scam artists use graphics that appear to go to
the legitimate websites (Windows Live Hotmail and Woodgrove
Bank, respectively), but actually take you to a phony scam site
or possibly a pop-up window that looks exactly like the official
site.
Here are a few phrases that are commonly used in phishing
email scams:
☆"Verify your account."
Businesses should not ask you to send passwords, logon
information or user names, Social Security numbers, or other
personal information through email.
If you receive an email message from Microsoft or any other
business asking you to update your credit card information, do
not respond: This is a phishing scam.
☆"You have won the lottery."
The lottery scam is a common phishing scam known as advanced
fee fraud. One of the most common forms of advanced fee
fraud is a message that claims that you have won a large sum
of money, or that a person will pay you a large sum of money
for little or no work on your part. The lottery scam often
includes references to big companies, such as Microsoft. There
is no Microsoft Lottery.
☆"If you don't respond within 48 hours, your account will be
closed."
These messages convey a sense of urgency so that you'll respond
immediately without thinking. A phishing email message might
even claim that your response is required because your account
might have been compromised.
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What does a phishing link look like?
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Sometimes phishing email messages direct you to spoofed
websites.
HTML-formatted messages can contain links or forms that you
can fill out just as you would fill out a form on a legitimate
website.
Phishing links that you are urged to click in email messages, on
websites, or even in instant messages, may contain all or part of
a real company's name and are usually masked, meaning that
the link you see does not take you to that address but
somewhere different, usually an illegitimate website.
Notice in the following example that resting (but not clicking)
your mouse pointer on the link reveals the real web address, as
shown in the box with the yellow background. The string of
cryptic numbers looks nothing like the company's web address.
This is a suspicious sign.
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How Does Phishing Work?
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Whether you have been the victim of a phishing scam or would
like to prevent yourself from being caught, you need to ask the
question, “How does phishing work?”
The Volunteering of Information
The answer to the question, “ How does phishing work ?” is quite
simple for the basic form of phishing. It works because you, the
user, volunteered your information to a non-trustworthy
source. This may have been in response to an email that
requested your social security number, bank details or username
and password for a financial or online institution.
The Imbedded Web Address
How does phishing work?
The next way phishing works is by
redirecting the victim to a seemingly legitimate website from
an email. The email may look like it has been sent from a bank,
the Internal Revenue Service or an online financial service such
as PayPal, escrow or an online financial rewards system. The
website that the victim is redirected to appears in every way to
be real. Upon entering usernames, passwords or any other vital
information, it is not unlikely that the website appears to crash.
This is because the phisher has what he needs and doesn’t want
the victim to find out about the phony website.
☆The Online Virus
Answering the question “How does phishing work?” becomes a
bit more difficult when the more sophisticated approaches are
concerned. Without becoming too technical, it can be explained
as a virus which infiltrates websites and then makes its way to
your computer. The virus then hibernates within your PC until
you visit a site it is programmed to pay attention to, such as a
banking site. Upon doing so, a pop-up window is launched which
asks you to re-enter your login details for security purposes.
Upon doing so, these details are forwarded on to the phisher
and you, the unsuspecting victim, continue on the legitimate site
only to find out later that money has been stolen from your
bank account.
☆The Fake Website
As virus software improved and people started to better
understand the concept of “how does phishing work?” phishers
began to create and design entirely fake online companies that
require essential information such as credit card details, social
security numbers, and banking particulars. So much research
and effort is put into creating these websites and false
companies that they are almost impossible to spot. Websense,
which is an online security company, made a statement saying
that these new sophisticated phishing sites by far outnumber
the old phishing methods of the past.
By answering the question, how does phishing work, and learning
about phishing, you can stay away from this type of online
scam.
