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Gone Phishing or How to keep from being caught!

The Internet and email has made it easy to do things that were hard. Such things as updating information to Credit Card companies once required a telephone call or a letter to make address changes and other updates. Now you can do banking and check balances by signing into the bank’s or Credit Card website and do those things.

While it has made some things easy it has also developed a bad side of the web too. A practice call phishing is now running rampant through the Internet. Phishing is characterized by attempts to fraudulently acquire information, such as passwords, Social Security numbers and other personal details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication. The term phishing derives from password harvesting.

Information from http://isc.incidents.org/diary.php?storyid=1194 says “Nearly all legitimate email messages from companies to their customers will contain an item of information that is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, including eBay and PayPal, always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses a user in a generic fashion (“Dear valued eBay member”) it is likely to be an attempt at phishing. Banks and credit card companies will often say something like “This message is about your account number XXXXXXXX1234″ with all but the last few digits replaced by “X” for security reasons. Therefore, one should always be suspicious if the message does not contains specific personal information. Phishing attempts in early 2006 have used just such highly personalized information, making it unsafe to rely on personal information alone as a sign that a message is legitimate.”

But recently I’ve seen many messages; especially those that look like valid message from PayPal and Ebay that have stated that my account has been put on hold. To reestablish the account click on a link and follow the questions asked.

What do I do when I get one of these type messages? I use many different emails accounts. My first question, “Is this the email account I registered?” If it’s not, then it’s obviously a phishing attempt. If it comes on the account that I did use to register, I never use the hyper-link to go to that account. I log on as usual. If the account needed information or had been put on hold, it would tell you.

It’s always best to be safe than sorry, so it’s best never to use a hyper-link from an email, if it appears as if they need additional information.

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