The Definition of Phishing and My Personal Commentary about this problem.
The Oxford pocket dictionary defines phishing as the activity of defrauding an online account holder of financial information by posing as a legitimate company. This is what phishing is known for now in today’s internet driven world but it was not always the case. Phishing actually predates computers.
Some people did it over the phone for years and they called it social engineering.
So why would someone think of phishing some one? There is a simple reason: to exploit people. These people are commonly known as scam artists. What these phishers normally do is send out millions of scam emails posing as something or someone who they are not. Normally they hope for a few people who received the email to respond to them by clicking the fake website and provide them with financial and or personal information. Also, anyone who has an email address is at risk of being phished. People can increase their risk of being targeted if their email is posted on a forum or website.
The people phishing can also get many more email addresses by using a spider. A spider is something that searches through many websites and saves an innumerable number of email addresses, everyone it can find. So, in a nut shell, phishing is very profitable for criminals because, they can attain millions of email addresses and potentially set them up for an attack at relatively no cost to themselves (Beal, 2006).
There are some key factors and elements that one needs to help recognize if they are being phished. This scam often has three key elements or factors that will come about when someone is planning an attack. First, when checking your email and look to see who the email is sent from. It will often be from a legitimate company’s address. If the email address looks suspicious then be wary, but this is an easy obstacle for phishers to climb over. It is very quick and easy for someone to change the “from field” in most email clients to trick the person receiving the emails. Second, the email almost always will contain very similar images or logos that have been copied off of the real company’s website. Third, upon opening the email, it will have a link along with text saying you should click the following link to make sure the personal information is correct. When trying to determine if you are part of a phishing experiment, there are many little things you might want to notice. These include spelling errors, unknown email addresses in text, and often the email headers can have absolutely nothing to do with the company that the email implies to the recipient (Beal, 2006).
Being aware of phishing is an important concept people should try to understand. First of all, you do not need to click the text or URL that is stated in the email. If you see a suspicious email, you should delete the email promptly. After deleting the email from your inbox, you should delete your trash can as well. Often you can block the email addresses that are sending you these risky emails. If the message or email looks very legitimate you still need to remember to never click the link or URL in the email. To make sure you are going to the website you anticipated, you should open up your web browser and type in the website manually. Then proceed to type in your personal information on the legitimate website (Beal, 2006).
It is very important to know what to do if you do find a suspicious email that is targeting you to be phished. First, you should notify the company that there are suspicious emails in regard to their company. Often companies will want to know if anyone is using this “phishing” technique with their company’s name. Also, if you find a phishing email you should report the phishing to the Federal Trade Commission. Many local police and investigators also take care and deal with internet phishing (Beal, 2006).
Now that phishing is becoming more common, criminals and scam artists are finding newer ways of targeting innocent people. A new, but becoming more common way of targeting people is the use of phishing and malware combined. Malware makes it where someone has control of the computer being targeted. Social engineering is often a very big part malware. So how does someone get control using malware? People can get control by attaching harmful attachments through emails. In the end, the user of the computer will execute a harmful file or software, and then from there, many different things can be downloaded. Even something as simple as accepting a license agreement can easily download and install malware. There is however a very slow and sometimes pain taking processes of sorting through the megabytes of data that have been collected in this form of attaining information. By combining malware with phishing, much vulnerability exists. The vulnerabilities can turn into things such as worms, viruses, and getting personal information. People often do not realize the effect of malware and phishing and what it can turn into. This is a major problem that is going on in my personal life right now. I will admit that I have been feeding into this information because everything has been performed by the use of a computer.
My personal experiences consist of getting scammed out of $16,977 dollars in Western Union Funds from March 13, 2008 through February 21, 2010 by an elite group of people; who have not been apprehended by the authorities and members of law enforcement. Further, I want to inform all of you that I got scammed again my someone who was using a name of a business woman. It turns out that she hacked her account. Anyway, she scammed me out of $1,550 dollars in Western Union Funds from September 2, 2016 through June 30, 2017. This young lady is of African descent. However, I have tried to officially find out where my money was picked up. For instance, if my money was picked up in the United States by people assuming the names of those people who are really involved in my old court case. I have collected a whole lot of information that these people tend to talk about on a regular basis. I might have been a Spider that this paper is talking about. A Spider, according to this paper is like a hoarder. This is a person who collects a lot of things, but refuse to discards these possessions. The actual people who scammed me are still living and breathing in an unknown location inside of this world. My accounts and cell phones are used simultaneously by an unknown person or a group of people. This means that every time that I am online, there is someone who is manually controlling my accounts and using them against me.
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