What Is Phishing?
Phishing is a technique used by fraudsters to obtain personal information in order to perpetrate identity theft. The technique is to convince the victim that it is for a trusted third party – banking, government, etc. In order to elicit personal information: passwords, credit card number credit, date of birth, etc. It is a form of computer attack based on social engineering (information security). Phishing can be done by e-mail, spoofed Web sites or other electronic means.
Phishing Terminology
The English term phishing is a variant spelling of the word fishing it is a spelling variation of the same type as the term phreaking (replaced by f ph).
The term was coined by the “pirates” who tried to steal AOL accounts. It would be built on the English-speaking password harvesting fishing, be “fishing for passwords. An attacker posing as a member team AOL and send an instant message to one potential victim. The message asked the victim to enter his password to, for example, “Check his AOL account” or “confirm their account information. Once the victim had revealed the password, the attacker could access the account and use it for malicious purposes, such as sending spam.
Phishing on the Internet
Computer criminals typically use phishing to steal money. The most popular targets are banking online, and sites of auctions such as eBay or PayPal. Proponents of the phishing emails usually send a large number of potential victims.
Typically, messages sent and appear to emanate from a society worthy of confidence and are worded so as not to alarm the recipient so that it performs an action accordingly. An approach often used is to tell the victim that their account has been disabled due to a problem and that the reactivation will be possible only when action on his part. The message then provides a link that directs the user to a web page that looks like the real company site trustworthy. Happened on this page misleading, the user is prompted to enter confidential information which are then recorded by the criminal.
In 2007, these computer criminals have changed their technique, using a means of hacking attack called the man in the middle to collect confidential information given by the user on the site visited.
There are different variants to phishing. Note the spear phishing and in-session respectively phishing phishing targeting (including the use of social networks) and phishing session (based on pop-ups while browsing).
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