Phishing- example & prevention

Phishing is a crimeware technique used to steal the identity of a target company to get the identities of its customers such as username, passwords and credit card details by pretending as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. While crimeware is a software designed to infect a computer and take personal information that can be used to steal from the computer users.

Phishing uses some form of yechnical deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to the organization. For example, the link http:// http://www.google.com@frame.fake.com/e.fake.com/ may deceive a user that the link will open a page on http://www.google.com/; in fact the link actually directs the browser to a page on frame.fake.com, using a username of http://www.google.com/.

Once, eBay customer received email notifues that their accounts had been settled and were being restricted. After clicking on the hyperlilnk provided in the email, they were briught to a web page which just looked the same as eBay's homepage. They were required to re-register their personal data, credit card data, ATM persinal identification numbers, etc. Howeve, the problem was eBay did not send the email to their customers and the webpage linked was not belong to eBay.

Computer security companies, such as Verisign (verisign.com) and NameProtect (nameprotect.com), offer services that search the Web for signs of phishing. Although their services thath search the Web for signs of phishing. Although their services help companies whose brands are exploited, they o not help individuals who are scammed. Therefore, individuals need to protect themselves from these crimeware.

• Verifying the authenticity and security of websites
• Use strong password and do not use the same password for more than one site
• Not to shopping online when using an unencrypted or open wireless network
• Securing computers before shopping online by keeping antivirus, antispam, and firewall software up-to-date
• Reviewing credit card for unauthorized changes
• Never replying to email or pop-up messages from seemingly trusted companies that ask for personal, financial or password information

References:

• Turban, Electronic Commerce: A Managerial Perspective
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/phishing