Often times we will receive an email in our inbox from a company we are familiar with, asking us to update our information on their site. But, how can you really be sure that the site you are familiar with is the one asking for the information, and not a thief?
Criminals creating websites to look like a company or financial institution is becoming a very large problem. The sole purpose for these sites is to trick you into revealing your personal information. The combination of using email and websites to fool you into giving out personal information is called "phishing".
Because they look like the real thing, it is sometimes very hard to spot a phishing email. The problem is that once you click on a link in a phishing email, you go to a website that is there only to steal your personal information.
The website that you are taken to when you click on a phishing email link will look nearly identical to the real website. If you are careful and look at the website address with great care, you can figure out that you are at a phishing website. Depending on how clever the criminals are, this process can either be easy or rather difficult.
You have to remember that the people who are sending phishing emails are professional thieves. There is a whole lot of money to be made by tricking people into giving out their personal information, so they usually spend a great deal of time and effort to make both the emails and websites look very real.
Coming across as being the real website is something that the phishing criminals spend a lot of time to perfect. Because they want to ultimately steal your personal information, and profit from this, they will go to great lengths to appear to be real. They will use the appropriate logos and other features that you will find on the real website, which tends to put you at ease.
It can be very difficult for the average person to determine if an email or website is real. The criminals are counting on you to not be able to tell the difference and trust that you are on the real website. This lets them steal your information with great ease.
Your best defense to a phishing attack is to make it a habit to never click on a link in an email. Even if you think the email is real, you are better off to go to the website as you normally would. If you never click on a link in a phishing email, then you can never become the victim of a phishing attack.
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