Amongst all the many nasty things out on the world wide web you may have heard of the relatively new phrase called Phishing.

Phishing comes from the word fishing (believe it or not!) and is a type of Internet threat that tries to con you into providing personal information. You may have had emails yourself saying that you have an important bank message waiting for you or similar.

The people that set these up are generally pretty clever – even the most savvy Internet user can fall for them. Take for example an email I see a lot – “you have a new message at your bank” – now in the past it has been known that if you have a message from your bank, they will not just send it via email, due to confidentiality, they will alert you that you have a message by email and then ask you to log into your secure Internet banking to see your email.

So the Phisher sends an email to you to say log into your bank to view this message and provides a nice link that says “Click her for HSBC” or similar – either way looking totally innocent. You then visit a page that looks identical to HSBC’s login page and input all your details to log in – you have just given all your details to the Phisher – there was never a message for you and you now run the risk of having money taken from your account.

So what can you do about this? Well the first important thing is to check the address you are going to when clicking a link: hover over the link below and look to the bottom right of your screen – it should tell you that the link is http://www.jbosolutions.co.uk

Here is a link

So you can feel pretty safe that this is going to take you to JBO no problem. Most of the fake links would go look something like this:

A Fake link 

 OK so I added the word badness into the link, but it could be anything which means it is not part of JBO at all – so do not trust it. If in doubt just visit the link by typing it in manually, searching via Google or accessing it from one on your favourites.

Now here is another trick they use that can be very clever and you have to watch out for it. Check out this link:

Can you spot it?

 

Notice the I has been replaced by a character 1 – this applies to l’s as well so be extra vigilant here – One that nearly got me was paypal and paypa1 – see how similar they are – I hate to think how many people unwittingly put in their details on this scam.

The safest way to be sure is never follow a link in an email.

Here are some of the top emails that have recently been going out – so watch out for these and don’t become a victim of Phishing!

Reactivate your account

Update your billing information

You have a new alert

Your AdWords account is on stop

Submit your payment information

Update your billing information

The list goes on………………………..

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Computer Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.