• Did you ever receive an email that appeared to be from your bank? • Did you click a link that sent you to what looked like your bank's website?• Did you enter your username and password?• When you clicked submit, did the site turn out to be bogus? If you said yes to any of these questions then you may have been ‘phished’. Phishing is a hacker term that essentially means trolling for personal or financial information. Phishing is also a crime! Millions of people online, 3.3 million in fact, fall victim to ‘social engineering’ such as clicking on tainted links in emails, receiving legitimate looking emails that direct you to poisoned sites to steal passwords and usernames, or any number of malicious ploys to get you to give up your personal information. Simply put, the perpetrators of these scams intend on selling your information or using it in some manner for personal gain. However, there are ways to stop them before they get you. Phishing (pronounced ‘fishing’), is the act of misleading people into turning over sensitive information under false pretenses. ‘Spoofing’ or ‘brand spoofing’ is when a hacker copies or crafts web pages and emails from the spoofed sites web site content. These emails and web pages are the used as bait. Once the victim takes the bait, the hacker proceeds to bleed victims financially from the information they glean. In 2007, victims of phishing lost an average of $886 per person. That’s $3.2 billion (USD). The number of people who actually got their money back is astoundingly lower. Only 1.6 million recovered money lost to phishing scams, that’s just over half of last years victims. You’ll be interested to know two things about phishing. If you know what to look for you know what to ignore. If your email provider is worth their salt, and you have a good mail client, these lures never see the light of day.
Gmail is at the top of the line when it comes to filtering out spam. Google offers infinitely better spam protection than AOL or Yahoo. What’s more, Google’s email service, Gmail, is free.
Step2
Abandon outdated mail clients. Upgrade to Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. I know for a fact people still use Outlook Express. If you use it, uninstall it and get something else.
Step3
Never follow links in an email claiming to be from your bank. Ignore these types of emails. Banking institutions never ask you to verify your online banking username and password, except perhaps during initial sign-up, though this is not a common practice. These links may lead to a website that looks like your bank’s site but is not.
Step4
The website linked to in the email may ask you to enter your username and password. Do not do this until you have verified you are dealing with your banking institution. Call customer service and ask if this is a common practice. If customer service tells you it is not common practice, notify them of the email you received, as well as the url in the email. Indicators are bad urls, no padlock icon in your browser or other security indicators missing from your usual online banking session experience.
Step5
The next step in protection is to install a good Anti-Virus and firewall. Some products for you to consider are:• AVG Free • Avast! Anti-Virus • ZoneAlarm • BlackICE PC Protection
Step6
Adjust you browser settings to tighten up security especially if you use web based email. If you receive an email with a bad link in it, add the link to your 'Restricted Sites'. To do this go to Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Security. On the 'Security' tab go to 'Restricted Sites', move the slider to 'high' and remember to add blocked sites so the computer knows whom to trust. Do the same in your email client and firewall. If you are using IE, the rule of thumb is to uninstall IE and use:• Mozilla Fire Fox• Maxthon Web Browser
Tips & Warnings
Be wary of “too good to be true” emails. Open emails ONLY from people you trust. Stay out of the spam box unless you need to empty it or find emails filtered by accident. If something looks odd, question it! Lastly, research products and companies before you do business with the site. Look for known indicators these companies are trusted.
Novice 
