Phishing. Example and Prevention (week 4)

There are 2 types of phishing. One is the Phishing Attacks and the other one is the Spear-Phishing Attacks. A simple explanation about phishing is that there are a numbers of fake online website that tries to lure online users to leak out their personal data and password, especially the credit card number.

Many have been solicited by fake eBay and Citibank requests for additional personal information. Research has found that there are occasional an e-mail from eBay advising user to update their account. There is a click button of right-click and View Source on the e-mail send and whenever you click it will link you to the other destination rather than eBay sites. This is one of the techniques that use by the phisher to hope that they will lure users with the threat of their account being closed or worse, hoping that they will provide their personal information.

There are several ways to prevent phishing which is through education. Gain additional knowledge on how to suspect corporate e-mail, even if it comes from a reliable authority. For example a company can hire security experts to spear-phish their own organization by looking for weak links and educating employees. Companies also can stop sending out links within IT, HR, and accounting-related e-mail rather than refer employees to an intranet, password-protected home page. Companies should also use secure Web forms rather than e-mail to transact personal information such as social security numbers and the like.

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