Phani Kumar’s Blog

Phishing is a well know criminal activity which takes place in the internet. Before we see how to gaurd ourselves against phishing let us see what phishing actually is.

Phishing is to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

1) Observe carefully when you receive a mail asking for your sensitive information.

• Check the email
• Check for mailed-by details in Gmail .
• In-case of Yahoo mail check for a message confirmation for the domain as in the below screen shot.

2) Check the URLs you are clicking.

The text might look like a legitimate URL but the link might take you to a phishing site as seen in the below screenshots.

Check for the actual links in the status bar of the browser by placing the mouse pointer on the URL. Popular sites won’t give you ipaddress but their domain names as links.

3) Use Secure software

Use softwares which are well known to be robust to such attacks like the firefox which is way better than the internet explorer in terms of security.

Additional softwares can also be used if you are willing to shell out some money but the above are the basic steps we can take to guard ourself against phishing attacks.