Phishing is a way that criminals get sensitive information (like usernames or passwords). Phishing is carried out mostly by email where you will get an email stating something like you have won a lottery or scholarship or the mail may appear to come from a bank or reputed company. The mail will ask you to visit the given link and to provide your personal information. The websites will look similar to a legitimate company that people believe them to be real and provide the information.
Mostly phishing is done to get the bank details of individuals. It is also used for identity theft.
How to Identify a Phishing mail?
You can identify these type of mails by properly going through the content. They will have spelling and grammatical errors. Any communication from a reputed company will have a good language. These mails often urge you take immediate action, without giving time to think. Always think how you won a scholarship or lottery without applying for it. The mail may inform you that your mail account/bank account is exploited, it is under threat or may be it will be terminated if you don't take quick action etc. Do not fall prey to such tricks.
Also you can look at the email id from which the mail originated. The mail id will not have the proper domain name of the company it claims to be.
How to Safe Guard?
Never provide your personal information or passwords through email
Do not click on the links that looks suspicious
Check the fact checking website to find whether the warning is real
If a mail is suspected as phishing, do not open it, mark it as spam
Always be careful while you are typing the URL of a website - a typo may lead you to a phishing site
Check for malwares that change your default search engine to something eles
Do not download mail attachments without verifying the authenticity
Make sure that the address use a secure connection (https://) for your email accounts, banking transatcitons, e-commerce etc. Look for the green color indicator for the secure site in the address bar.
No comments:
Post a Comment