Thursday, June 19, 2008

Phishing:Examples and Its Prevention Methods

Let me share with you what phishing is all about. Phishing is basically a method of collecting(stealing) information through fake Web sites which seem as real Web sites. In United States, approximately 1.2 million computer users suffered losses of $ 929 million USD which caused by phishing.

One of the examples of phishing is Adwords. It is a Google’s flagship advertising product. Google offers pay-per-click advertising which seems attractive to marketing salesperson to deal with their business. In fact, “phishers” have taken up this opportunity to steal information by creating a fake Web site.

Here is the example of a faking URL:


Other indicators of phishing such as:
1. The email address of a user in a generic fashion which may lead to a high probability of phishing. Eg: Dear valued eBay member….
2. As mentioned above, the fake URL like http://www.google.com@members.thinkbank.com/ may trick the user to log in by clicking a link provided in the site, such as
http://www.google.com/. In fact, the link actually directs the browser to phishers on members.thinkbank.com.
3. The other common trick used by phishers is requesting the user to “verify” their account or “update” their information.
Increase in the public awareness of phishing by identifying the real URL of a Web site helps to solve the problem. Here is a video that I downloaded from youtube. I would like to share with you on how to identify a fake URL and a real URL.






Users also can use software programs to identify phishing contents on Web sites and emails. There are some anti-phishing software available in the market such as Phishing-Sweeper-Enterprise, Phishing Detector, Phishing Zapper, etc.
Click here to look for more anti-phishing software.

Besides, the use of spam filter also helps in protecting a computer users from phishers. Kindly visit to
Cloudmark to look for various types of anti-phishing spam filters.

For organizations, Cloudmark introduced some unique verification tools such as challenging questions and secret images which serve the purpose of verifying a passwords. Or, users could look for the digital certificate to ensure the particular site is being certified and reliable before proceeding with any transaction. A good example would be Maybank2u.com


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