Phising Attacks Online Bankers
Filed Under Technology
The latest local news regarding phising concerned me a bit. Well, I do buy things and services in the internet and my credit card was once replaced by Citibank due to iminent attacks they fortunately detected. That incident actually made me more careful on my internet transactions. But what about other people?
By the way, what really is the definition of PHISING? It is defined by TheFreeDictionary.com as :
In computing, phishing (also known as carding and spoofing) is a form of social engineering, characterised by attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication, such as an email or an instant message. The term phishing arises from the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to “fish” for users’ financial information and passwords.
A sample phising email directed to Paypal users is shown here. As you will notice, the email really looked authentic and any unsuspecting user can be easily fooled to click on the link which is directed to a non-PayPal domain. The link actually points to http://211.248.156.177/.paypoal/cgi-bin/webscrcmd_login.php instead of the regular http://paypal.com/…. Once the user tries to login to that unscrupulous website, they already have the user’s ID and password which they can use to access the real account of that person in paypal. That’s just the start, of course. Though these cyber-criminals has a very low rate of success, sending this kind of emails in millions means having a success rate of 5% will give them 50,000 accounts per million.
And because our country is just starting to catch up with the internet wave, we are more vulnerable than our more advanced neighbors simply because as a beginner, we tend to test things trial-and-error way. By doing that, we might unconsiously send sensitive information to criminals. I find it a good thing that news like the one featured here is beginning to show on the local news scene as I think it would help in educating our local netizens and make them more careful and vigilant in doing internet transactions.
I also don’t think phising will go away in the near future but this should not discourage us from harnessing the power of the internet. WEB2.0 has changed the way we do business and use internet. A lot of technologies is coming out that will make internet life easier and enjoyable. It is a far cry from the old WEB1.0 that crashed at the start of the millenium. New technologies are there to help make lives easier and though criminals are also becoming more and more sophisticated, the benifits internet provides is far greater than its downside. Actually, you may not know it but internet has been helping you in a lot of different ways. As I have said, we just need to be careful and vigilant and be kept informed on how to deal on these problems.