What is phishing?
Phishing attacks use e-mail or malicious Web sites to solicit personal, often financial, information. Attackers may send e-mail seemingly from a reputable credit card company or financial institution that requests account information, often suggesting that there is a problem. When users respond with the requested information, attackers can use it to gain access to the accounts.
‘Phishing’ refers to the practice of fraudsters ‘fishing’ for your details in order to find out and misuse sensitive personal and financial information. Criminals may, for instance, make identical copies of existing corporate websites, or send scam e-mails to elicit a response from you and trick you into divulging your personal information.
Phishing is a fraudulent email scam that uses spam to attempt to get consumers to disclose or verify their account numbers, personal identification numbers (PIN), Social Security numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information. This email typically resembles an email from a familiar company and may have a similar Internet address to that company in the text; however, it will usually have a couple of letters transposed.
Phishing (pronounced “fishing”) refers to fraudulent communications designed to deceive customers into divulging personal, financial or account information. These scams come in different forms and are evolving regularly, such as e-mails that provide a link to a fraudulent site, inviting the recipient to enter personal information. In addition, several computer viruses have recently been used in an effort to silently capture information from infected machines. This underscores the importance of ensuring that your computer is fully patched, per the manufacturer’s instructions.
Phishing, pronounced ‘fishing’, is the term coined by hackers who imitate legitimate companies in emails to entice people to share passwords or credit card numbers. An email is broadcast from a fake server address, pretending to be the real company or financial institution, containing an invitation to verify or to enter Username password. The fake website looks like the real one from the financial institution.
