What is Phishing
What is Phishing ?
Phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by appearing as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and other online banks are common targets.
Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.
Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical measures.
Recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. Social networking sites such as facebook, orkut are also a target of phishing.
Spoofed/Fraudulent e-mails are the most widely used tools to carry out the phishing attack. In most cases we get a fake e-mail that appears to have come from a Trusted Website . Here the hacker may request us to verify username & password by replaying to a given email address.
TECHNIQUES BEHIND PHISHING ATTACK
1. Link Manipulation
Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to some trusted organization or spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL
instead of http://www.microsoft.com
2. Filter Evasion
Phishers have used images instead of text to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing emails. This is the reason Gmail or Yahoo will disable the images by default for incoming mails.
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