What happened in the case of the e-mail scam involving ICICI Bank?
A few customers of ICICI Bank received an e-mail asking for their Internet login name and password to their account. The e-mail seemed so genuine that some users even clicked on the URL given in the mail to a Web page that very closely resembled the official site. The scam was finally discovered when an assistant manager of ICICI Bank’s information security cell received e-mails forwarded by the bank’s customers seeking to crosscheck the validity of the e-mails with the bank. Such a scam is known as ‘phishing.’ What does phishing mean? Phishing means sending an e-mail that falsely claims to be a particular enterprise and asking for sensitive financial information. Phishing, thus, is an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will then be used by the scammer for his own benefit. Phishing uses ‘spoofed’ e-mails and fraudulent Web sites that look very similar to the real ones thus fooling the recipients into giving out their personal data. Most phishing attacks
