Phishing: Examples and its prevention methods

As the world has become so dependent on the Internet, it gives chances for crimes to exist such as data being hacked by unauthorized people. Well, phishing is only one of the crime that happen in the worldwide.

What is phishing?

Phishing is a crimeware technique used by unauthorized party to steal the identity of a target company to its customers. Phishing can be an act of sending an e-email to users, falsely claiming to be an established authorized companies with the effort to scam the user into giving freely their private information. It is also known as identity theft. Phishing created a hard challenges for the existing e-commerce enterprises and those enterprises entering e-commerce network.

The most common target for phishing is Paypal, eBay and online banks. For example, a recent phishing happened in Canada, where a loss amounting to $ 10 million occured. U.S. banks, a credit and debit card distribution company and a payment processor had been hack by an Israeli hacker, Ehud Tenenbaum.

How phishing work ?

For the first step of phishing, the phishers will decide which business to be their target and determine how to steal its customers' e-mail addresses. The technique usually used by those phishers as spammers are mass-mailing and address collection.

For the second step, phishers will then create method for delivering the message and collecting the data. The methods which are mostly used are through e-mail address and a web page.

The third step will be the action of sending the false message that appears to be from a
established legitimate enterprise.

Finally, the phishers will be able to access and record the data of the victims once they enter into the web pages or popup windows. With the information that they obtained, various illegal activity can be done by them.

Example of phishing:

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How to prevent phishing?

In order to prevent phishing from occuring, the following prevention can be taken:
1) Understand how phishing work. By understanding how it works, users will be more alert in safeguarding their private information or data. You may refer to the article of 'How to defeat phishers relating to the e-mail sent from ebay".

2) Use the outlook 2003 to filter out phishing email. This outlook 2003 is designed with a built-in Junk E-mail folder that does a good job by removing out spam. Therefore, this can help to prevent phisher from getting a chance to hack users' private information.

3) Users must always be aware of the emails and certain internet message received. In other words, they must not simply trust any information that appears in the website.

4) Users might also acquire anti-phishing service that helps in detecting and blocking phishing site to safeguard their confidencial information and date. An example of anti-phishing services is PowerShark Anti-phishing solution

5) Another prevention that users can apply is to do business or any transaction with the companies that you trust. This will reduce the risk of becoming another victim of phishers.

Reference:

Turban, E., King, D., Mckay, J., Marshall, P., Lee, J., & Viehland, D. (2008). Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective 2008 (International Edition). Upper saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Education International.