Phishing Scams Essay

997 Words4 Pages
Phishing Scams Technology is ever increasing. With each day and night, our technological world is rapidly changing. Along with this change however, also come many costs. One cost that has caught the attention of many is Phishing scams. According to Wikipedia, “phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication” (“Phishing”). Therefore, sensitive information is being obtained from users online and is being used to steal their personal identity. We will discuss how phishing scams happen in a variety of ways on the World Wide Web, the damage that is caused, and lastly how to prevent your self from being a victim of these phishing scams. There are several ways that hackers can get to your personal information via Internet. Some of these ways include link manipulation, filter evasion, website forgery and lastly, phone phishing. Link manipulation is a technique that is designed to make a link or an email look like the authentic organization’s work. A way of spoofing used links to contain the “@” symbol in the URL in order to prompt the user for a username and password. For example, the link “http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/” might seem as it will open a google.com page but in actually it opens a “members.tripod.com” page where the user is prompted to enter in their personal information (“Phishing”). Another way to make these scams look like they are the authentic websites is through the use of filter evasion. Phishers use images instead of text so it makes it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing emails (“Phishing”). Another way to tell if an email message is fraudulent is to look for a few key phrases. “Verify your account” –businesses should not ask you to send
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