Phishing: You will never want to be a fish 1

The term Phishing comes from the analogy to “fishing”. The phisher uses a bait to lure victims into giving out personal information like passwords and credit card numbers. The bait is typically an urgent plea from one of the victims friends or trusted websites, asking for information to resolve some sort of problem with their account

Now the question arises despite being so intelligent and clever how does hacker become successful in their goals.The simple answer is our blind trust on our friends, over confidence on us and obviously our careless attitude.The very common way to hunt is email. We daily receives many mails from trusted websites along with few links. We are very clumsy so just click on those links which navigates us to a new page asking for our confidential details like username and password to login that website to see the details. We rarely bothers to give a glance to the address bar whether the address mentioned is correct or if the page displaying to us is original or fake.

In a phishing attack, the attacker creates a situation wherein people believe that they are dealing with an authorized party, like their bank or another service provider. The attacker will ask the victim for sensitive information such as credit card information.

Phishing attacks mainly targets the information like bank account details,your username and password of your accounts. They use social engineering to convince you to install malicious software or hand over your personal information under false pretenses. They might email you, call you on the phone, or convince you to download something off of a website.

(Credits: Microsoft Safe & Security Center )

Following protective measures should be adopted to prevent these attacks -

Do nott open emails from untrusted source.
Check the details of the mail, its source of origin etc.
Never click any link given in the email.
If you find that mail is from authenticated source than make it habit to type that link manually in the address bar

I hope that you understood the basics of Phishing attack !! . Share your views !!