subject: How To Prevent Yourself From Being Phished [print this page] Phishing can be described as an activity to acquire personal information from someone using electronic communication. This may easily lead you to a critical condition as the data stolen in many cases are very confidential such as bank account or credit card data. The fraudulent practice is often times performed by taking advantage of email system. The content, even though it looks originate from a real business like Amazon, actually can send the reader to a bogus site.
In addition to email, another common medium that often used by phishers to do this activity is instant messaging. A trick named keylogging is also in many instances applied by phishers. Making use of keylogging software, a special tool intended to track your keyboard activities, a phisher can uncover your username, password and other important data without difficulty. There are even programs that come with a capability to record all the things displayed on your pc screen.
The growing number of software specially built to grab sensitive data has proven that this threat cannot be taken lightly. More frustrating, the compromised information is in many cases submitted to FTP hosts meaning it can be seen by many people around the world. In other words, your personal details such as your email account information could end up on the internet.
To safeguard your personal machine from such a danger, it is advisable to install a quality anti virus tool. Several other protection software you should use are spam blocking tool and personal firewall. A spam blocker can help you avoid getting phishing emails. A firewall, as the name indicates, can minimize illegal connection to/from your computer system. You can also get web browser toolbars that include a feature to assist you to recognize phishing sites.
In addition to installing such security tools, there are some other practices you should take. For example, it is strongly advised to never creating the very same password as well as username for different sites. An additional protection is to under no circumstances click on hyperlinks in an email message. Simply type the web address directly into the internet browser. Such links are frequently employed by spammers to lead you to false sites.
Also remember that it is uncommon for banking companies to request personal information via email. Simply get in touch with them directly via phone in order to verify. Furthermore, fraudulent emails normally do not personalize their content. Another good practice you should develop is to close your internet browser whenever you arrive at a site where its security certificate number does not match. As a final point, do not ever be in doubt to report every single phishing attempt in a timely manner to authorized institutions.
