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Email From Your Bank Asking For Personal Details – Could Be Phishing! In the last decade, phising has become one of the new security headaches
for users in the Internet. Although anti phishing software has been
around for some time it isn’t considered as essential as an
antivirus or a firewall. Should you then look for a anti phishing
solution? Maybe. Let’s find out.
What Does Phishing Mean?
Actually, the word comes from the original fishing, and the meaning
is quite similar. While you are fishing you extract fish from the
sea, but in the case of phising, you extract information from the
internet.
This term appeared for the first time in the mid nineties in America
Online, when criminal hackers, also known as crackers, started using
social engineering techniques for acquiring private information
from users.
For example, a cracker sent a serious looking email or a notification
through instant messaging, telling the user to input its username
and password for whatever purpose. If the victim was a basic user,
it was most probable that she or he would fall for the trap, giving
away his private information to the attacker. It would be later
used for a series of illegal schemes, like software piracy or spamming.
Although America Online managed to reduce the cases of phising
by a huge percentage, they still exist in our days. They simply
adapted to new techniques.
The Evolution of Phising
Nowadays, the most common kind of phising is through email. Since
the end of the AOL phising days, crackers found that there were more
lucrative sources of money: the costumers of online banking and online
payment services.
The method is quite simple. They find the basic information of
an user (email account, name and surname) and send them an email
posing as the costumer support department of a bank or a common
online payment service, like Paypal.
Thanks to statistics, if they sent one hundred email to different
persons, at least one should use Paypal or have a bank account in
that determined financial entity. The victim could find himself
lured into the trap, clicking on the link that appeared in the mail.
The web page that loaded appeared as valid as the original, eliminating
any doubt the user may had about it.
Fortunately, several companies have started to make anti phishing
software that is capable of knowing if you are the potential victim
of a crime. An anti phishing tool looks for determined things that
are common in phising, alerting the user of any danger, especially
from new kind of phising. For example, it has recently evolved to
a new level: spear phising. Somehow, phisers have found how to determine
what kind of financial service a victim uses. With this information,
they don’t need to send hundreds of emails waiting for someone
to fall. They attack a specific consumer, knowing that there is
a greater chance of luring him.
Even more, they have used the unconscious dread that exists for
the Internal Revenue Service to lure more users into their evil
schemes. They send emails looking as the IRS, asking for sensitive
data like bank accounts, usernames and passwords.
Once this technique becomes common knowledge, no one knows what
new method these criminals may create.
Continue to: What are Anti Phishing Solution
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