What is phishing?
Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which
criminals send out legitimate-looking e-mail requesting personal
and
financial details from unsuspecting people. The messages
normally appear to come from well-known and
trustworthy Web sites. Web sites that
are often used in phishing attacks include eBay, PayPal, Yahoo,
MSN, and
America Online as well as the sites of
a lot of big banks and retailers.
They want your identity
Typically, the fraudulent e-mails direct victims to counterfeit
Web pages that look identical to the companies' sites in order to
fool you into submitting personal, financial or password data.
Phishing e-mails will almost always tell you to click a link that
takes you to a site where your personal information is requested.
Legitimate organizations would probably never request this sort of
information via e-mail.
If you submit the information anyway, the scammer will be able
to access your account and you are vulnerable to identity theft.
Your money may be transferred away into the criminal's account or
used to make online purchases.
Phishing is spreading
A couple of years back phishers mostly targeted big American
financial institutions, but nowadays phishing attacks have spread
to other countries and languages as well and also target smaller
companies. Swedish bank Nordea has suffered one of the biggest
publicly known phishing frauds in history. Over 8 million kronor
($1,200,000) disappeared in three months as a result of a
tailor-made attack launched by Russian criminals. Reports indicated
that 250 customers had become victims.
The number of phishing attacks tracked by industry association
the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has multiplied 100-fold
between January 2004 and May 2006 and the number has continued to
grow since then. In April 2007 APWG detected 55,643 new phishing
sites while 11,121 phishing sites were deteched in April 2006.
Phishing is mostly associated with spam, whereby thousands of
messages are sent out at once in the hope that a few people will
take the bait. Therefore, phishing attempts often appear to come
from sites and companies with which you do not even have an
account.
The word "phishing" refers to the Internet fraudsters using
email lures to "fish" for passwords and financial data from the sea
of Internet users.
For more information on avoiding phishing scams,
please visit this antiphishing guide.
The BullGuard Spamfilter protects you
against phishing
The BullGuard Spamfilter is effective at detecting phishing
attempts. Every email is analysed in multiple ways to
determine whether the email is genuine, spam or a phishing attempt.
In addition, the BullGuard Spamfilter is constantly updated to
block the latest known phishing emails.
When in doubt, BullGuard users can always get in touch with BullGuard Support, who will help you
sort out any security related question 24/7. With BullGuard you get
the most comprehensive phishing protection on the market.
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