What is a Phishing Attack and How To Get Protected Against Phishing Attacks – One of the biggest problems on the internet today is the lack of phishing awareness. In this blog, I will talk about what is phishing and how to get protected against it. Also, we will discuss how to build security awareness against phishing attacks.
1-) What is a Phishing Attack?
The basic definition of phishing is a hacker’s action attempting to gather your personal information for evil purposes. Victims mostly are aimed for their bank account credentials, and phishing attacks cases usually end up with a drained bank account. Just under one innocent link, you can face tons of evil purposes. Thus always keep in mind to be extremely careful before taking any action on suspicious emails, or it’s inevitable to lose your personal information.
2-) How Do Phishers Attack?
As technology advances, hackers find so many convincing ways to scam users online. There are a few common ways they use and there isn’t a specific way to spot if a link is a phishing site. Yet, we will mention a few common ways of techniques that fraudsters mostly use:
- They will try to get pop-up ads on your page and these ads will mostly be about winning a prize in a contest that you aren’t even sure if you have taken part in.
- Saying that you’ve won a brand new car with a lot of money, sometimes users trust these links and click on them, it results in their personal information getting stolen.
- Simply anything that comes weird and suspicious to you, it is not only that, they also duplicate logos and other details of the original sites to make you grow trust on them. These are the common phishing ways of fraudsters.
a) They will mostly play tricks on links, this includes abbreviations and shortened fake links. If they were the link that they show you but literally aren’t, we can explain it better by wearing a mask.
f.e: thislinkdirectstophishingsite.com forces to show if it was a bityl address.
b) There is a quick tip that we always maintain for users to know and check out the expanded version of the link they send you through an application or online site. This way you will be even more steady against phishing attacks.
c) Irrelevant/strange characters should ring a bell; legitimate sites never use irrelevant characters on their site links.
d) However, setting malware protection and keeping your firewall settings on recommended are pretty helpful. This way you won’t only prevent phishing but many other types of attacks.
Last but not least, think twice before taking an action on the internet. Make sure that you are where you want to be on the site, irrelevant links shouldn’t distract users.
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“This post is originally published at www.keepnetlabs.com”
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