What is Phishing?

Basically Phishing is online identify theft. They use many various methods of capturing your information. SPAM, malicious Web sites, email messages and instant messages to name a few methods. The idea is to trick people into divulging sensitive information, such as bank and credit card accounts.

How can you spot a Phishing scam?

People who use Phishing, usually pretend to be a legitimate company, they may use email or Instant messaging to request personal information and attempt to direct unsuspecting recipients to respond through malicious web sites which try to look authentic.

Requests for confidential information via email or Instant Message tend not to be legitimate and you should never divulge or use the email links in those types of messages. Always go to the official sites through your browser and not via a hyperlink in a instant message or email.

These con artists tend to use scare tactics or urgent requests to entice recipients to respond i.e. A phisher may use a Bank as an example referring to recent fraudulent transactions being made and for you to log onto the web site to confirm your logon details.

Fraudulent messages are often not personalised and may share similar properties like details in the header and footer.

The phisher sites can look remarkably like a legitimate company's site because they tend to use the copyrighted images from original legitimate sites.