Phishing for the Truth

As hard as it is to believe, only a few short years ago, we lived in the “information dark ages”. A horrible time full of paper, phone calls, and personal contact. Today, up to the minute financial information is three clicks and an eight-digit password from my greedy little eyes. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow indeed.

So, keeping that in mind, check your email. Sift through the torrent of ads and unwanted solicitations, and you may find a disturbing notice from your bank. There is a problem with your account and you need to update your PIN on the website. No problem, right? Take a closer look.

Phishing is the act of fabricating a false email, message, or website in order to “fish” for information. The most common targets are account numbers, PINs, and passwords. How many readers have discovered a banker in Nigeria interested in them after a wealthy man has died? How about a Paypal and EBay account being shut down unless you supply them with your credentials?

According to AntiPhishing.org, 13,776 phishing attacks linked to 5,259 Web sites took place in August of 2005. That’s one month. How do they get away with it? What makes thousands of people fall into these traps?

Phishers have been refining their art for years. Instead of instead of plain text emails asking for your personal information, they have learned to carefully design credible and amazingly authentic looking messages and websites. They use “spoofing”, the concealment and replacement of original website information and email credentials, to appear as whomever they want. It is the natural evolution of the quick hustle con, into the digital age.

Protection from phishing has become an integral part of modern internet and security software. Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox have built in phishing filters that check the credentials of a website against the contents, to filter out many of the less obvious scams. Software however, will never replace education and common sense. Here are a couple of guidelines that will help make your online life a little easier.

• Check the spelling of links in any suspicious emails. For many, the stern wording of the message, and the thought of an error will keep you from noticing that you have never used paypai.com.
• Always hover over links with the mouse and check the pop up address against what is written. Often, the message you can see will be correct, but the actual address it points to will be the phishing site.
• If possible, circumvent the links in the message and use the address bar, or a favorite’s link to navigate.

If you have a computer or technology question, please feel free to email us at techguys@ican-solutions.com or come by the website at www.ican-solutions.com.

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