Phishing - What exactly is this and why should you care?

©Beth Siess SIESServices - Web Consulting

taken from webopedia.com
Pronounced “fishing,” the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.

This is not something new, and the FTC has been fighting these scams from day one. What is new is the future technology used to phish your information.

Reading eweek Today revealed what most do not wish to acknowledge, that in fact phishing is going on behind our backs and we have no way of knowing.

I suggest you read this article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1582985,00.asp
and take action in the way you view your emails. Which I will tell you about by reading the rest of this article. **Remember things are always changing and you need to stay informed about online threats for you and the way you conduct your business.

As most of us know we need to be aware of false emails.
**Never go directly to their web site via your email link!

This is also true if we do not want excessive amounts of spam. If you are getting updates and news from places you have signed up for, be aware they might be tracking your visits send you more stuff they think you are interested in. The best way to check out a link from your email is to decipher the main page url from the link, such as if you notice I send out links to my web blog,

http://www.siesservices.com/web-blog/niche-research.html
the main page address is: http://www.siesservices.com

Or you might try looking up the product in a search engine.
For example: I suggested you take a look into a firewall called
"black ice"

So what you do is search on google.com or yahoo.com, etc
black ice - firewall

By the way if you do not know what a firewall is or what it will do!
I suggest you go to the black ice website and read up:
http://blackice.iss.net/

Now for the new technology used by identity theft scammers, is through email. but in a different way. If you didn't understand exactly how there scams are taking place after reading through the eweek article, I will summarize here:

First you will receive an email with no subject line, and no information in the body of the email.

Once you download this email to your harddrive, it will silently run through your system sending information such as passwords or recent keystrokes, you have made when purchasing something online. Sounds creepy doesn't it. You might not want to believe this is going on, I thought at first I would be covered since I have a firewall installed, right! Guess again - this kind of threat will by pass a firewall! Like I said this is the newest form of Phishing going on.

So you ask how can I protect my self,
well I have to pass on the exact information that I received from my good friend Joe Clayton,

The best defense for this, is to NEVER set your email program to
auto-view/auto-display emails. turn the view pane off in your
"options" settings. This way, you have to double-click an email to
view it. You would delete such blank emails without viewing them.

There you have it - Take action Today and Protect yourself from this Phishing Scam. Change the way you view your mail and NEVER OPEN email without a subject line, and always stay up to date on your anti-virus software such as Norton.

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web consultant, Beth Siess  ©SIES Services 2004
Teaching YOU how to Build Your Web Business
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