What is Phishing?

Phishing is the act of convincing or tricking a user into giving away personal information. Phishing can come in all kinds of flavors. They can come in e-mails saying you won something and all they need to process your winnings and have them ship it out to you is your name, address, credit card information, and maybe even your social security number (which you should NEVER give out online unless you know your information is being transferred over a secure encrypted server). They always promise they won't charge anything to it, it's just for security purposes (yea right).

You may be thinking, I'll never be tricked by one of these foolish scams, but think again. As I said before, phishing comes in many different flavors. Say you got an e-mail from you bank stating that there has been strange activity on your account and they need to verify you information. So the e-mail asks you for your personal information such as your name, address, SS#, etc. DON'T GIVE IT TO THEM, because it probably is an impersonator pretending to be your bank. This has happened plenty of times and is one of the leading causes of identity theft.

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First of all, your bank (if is a legitimate bank) will NEVER ask you input your personal information into an e-mail and send it to them.

Secondly, even if there is a link in the e-mail they ask you to click on to go to the banks website and fill in information, pay attention to the address bar and make sure it displays your banks url. And look closely because a lot of phishers like to disguise their url's to look as if it were the real site.

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For Internet Explorer user, their is a great phishing filter already included in the newest version (Internet Explorer 7) to help protect against being phished. You can download the latest version of IE from Download.com or Microsoft's website directly. To make sure your Phishing Filter is turned on...

Open your Internet Explorer Click Tools Hover over Phishing Filter When the pop-up menu shows up, the second option should be either "Turn On Automatic Website Checking" or Turn Off Automatic Website Checking" You want it to say "Turn Off Automatic Website Checking" because this means that it is already on. If it says "Turn On Automatic Website Checking" then click on it to turn it on.

For Firefox Version 2 or later users, the Phishing Filter is automatically activated. To test to make sure your Phishing Filter is on and working you can go to the site below. A warning dialog should appear and you can just click "Get me out of here" to exit the site.

Firefox Phishing Test site

If the site doesn't show the warning dialog, then make sure your phishing settings are on by doing the following in Firefox...

Click Tools Click Options Click Security Here make sure the options "Warn me when site try to install add-ons" and "Tell me if the site I am visiting is a suspected forgery" are checked And under the "Tell me if the site I am visiting is a suspected forgery" option make sure the "Check using a downloaded list of suspected sites" option is selected. Firefox does a great job keeping the list of suspected sites updated.

A lot of Internet Security Suites, such as Norton, comes equipped with Phishing filters also.

What is Phishing?

My name is Sergio Woods and I've been studying computers for over 7 years now. I have a great deal of knowledge in aspects ranging from Internet Administration to software programming to hardware and component installation. In my studies I have come to realize that there are very general things even the most casual computer user should know how to do in order to keep their computer running at its peak performance.

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