What do phishing, spoofing, and spyware mean?
Phishing is fooling people into providing their private information such as credit card numbers, bank IDs, passwords, and so on. After the Katrinia hurricane, a number of phishing web sites appeared asking for charitable donations to help the hurricane victims. Emails containing links to the phishing web sites were sent out. There are reports that hackers are mimicking the HTML of web sites of banks and other financial institutions in order to scam unwitting victims into supplying ids and passwords. Phishing is an authentication security vulnerability. How do you confirm that the person on the other side of the transaction is who they are? The best defence is knowledge and vigilance. Banks (or other companies for that matter) will never send you an email about unusual activity on your account and ask you to click on a link in the email. If an actual bank does that to you, switch banks as soon as possible – they obviously don’t know about email authentication vulnerabilties. Spoofing is
