The whole idea can be quite frightening and very disheartening to a tenderfoot of the Internet. So, what should one do?
For starters, unsolicited e-mail should go in the same place that unsolicited junk mail likely goes when found in the mail box. The trash. This includes e-mails with attachments from folks you do not know. I get ten birthday card e-mails a day, all year round from people and places I don’t even know. Even if the email looks official, DO NOT click on any links contained in it. Instead, go straight to the source. If the IRS sends you an e-mail advising you they owe you money which the won’t then get ’em on the phone or type in their address directly from your web browser. Http://www.irs.gov is not hard to remember. The United States Federal Government is surprisingly efficient at shutting Phishing operations that use their name, even when those sites are outside the United States. The next thing we can all do is stop letting these criminals use our computers. You see, it’s very inefficient for a Phishing criminal to use his own computers. Instead, he prefers to use our PC’s to generate a
