Phishing" Examples and its prevention methods

In computing, 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. Paypal, eBay and online banks are common targets.

Following is one of the examples of phishing email scam subject line that attempts to make you panic so you will sign on without thinking:
Need your help! In God we trust!
Sometimes, they often use God in the subject line to try and get people's attention. These emails usually need you to help wire transfer the money. Your reward will be part of the profits, sometimes millions of dollars. Avoid this email all together, these are obviously fake because whatever they can get from you, you will see no money in return.
Example of PHISHING:










For further examples, click the link below:
http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/phishing_examples.php

However, not all phishing attacks require a fake website , the can also be a phone phishing such as there is a messages that claimed to be from a bank told the users to dial a phone number regarding problems with their bank accounts. Once the phone number ( owned by the phished, and provided by a Voice over IP service)was dialed, prompts told users to enter their acount numbers and PIN. Vishing( voice phishing) sometimes uses fake caller-ID data to give the appearance that calls come from a trusted organization.

There are several different techniques can be used to combat phishing. One of the strategy for it is to train people to recognize phishing attempts and do deal with them. For example, Do NOT click the links in the emails and Do NOT panic because you got an email. If you have any doubts, open your browser and sign on SEPARATELY without clicking any email link and WITHOUT following any instructions in the email. The using of browsers such as Microsoft's IE7 browser, Mozilla Firefox 2.0, and Opera can alerting the users to fraudulent websites or help to identify the legitimate site.

Besides that, certain specialized spam filters which rely on machine learning and natural language processing approaches to classify phishing e-mails can be used to reduce the number of phishing e-mails that reach their addressees' inboxes. Legal responses are another method use to fight the phishing. For example, the federal anti-phishing bill can proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and send bogus e-mails in order to defraud consumers could be fined up to $250,000 and be jailed for up to five years.

As a conclusion, the damage caused by phishing ranges are from denial of access to email to substantial financial loss. Be careful out there!!!!!!!