Phishing- Trying to steal your identity

With the rise of the Internet for transactions and interactions, and the rising use of email as a form of communication, we have seen an increase in the criminal activity of phishing. Phishing involves a criminal fraudulently attempting to gain your personal information. They want your usernames, passwords and credit card details.

By far the most common phishing technique around involves the criminals pretending to be from a legitimate organisation such as eBay, PayPal or banking institutions. They may send you an email, which could look realistic, and encourage you to click on a link to a website which may look very similar to that institutions actual website.

There are a variety of deceptions that are commonly used to click on the links in the phishing email:nn· Misspelled Domains: this involves purchasing a domain that looks very similar to the original domain- one example of this would be if an upper-case “I” was replaced with a lowercase “L”.nn· Sub-domains: An example of something like this may be www.bank.com.phishingsite.com. If you have scanned the email and seen what looks like a link to your bank’s site, you may click on the link without fully checking the whole domain.nn· Alter Anchor Text: A hasher may alter the html in an email so that it may look like you are going to www.legitsite.com but you end up at another site.

If you click on the links, phishers are becoming much more adept at making their scam sites look extremely realistic. Later phishing scams can make it appear if the legitimate sites domain name appears in the address bar. Two common ways of doing this are to place a picture over the actual address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one containing the legitimate URL.

As technology advances, so does the technology of phishers trying to steal your information. You must be ever vigilant and remember, if there seems something fishy about the email you have received, it is probably a scam.