There is no doubt that identity theft is a growing problem and we should all try to educate ourselves to avoid being a victim of this often devastating crime. It seems that criminals are using increasingly ingenious methods to gain access to our private and valuable personal information and computer users must be aware of criminal information gathering techniques known as phishing.
You may have heard about phishing scams in the news recently because so many have fallen prey to this clever methodology employed by tech savvy criminals. We are all busy in todays fast paced world and it’s hard to keep up with every new threat and development so the purpose of this article is to describe what phishing is, and how you can avoid being a victim.
Phishing attacks employ social engineering and technical subterfuge in the attempt to obtain an individual’s personal identity data and financial account information. Social-engineering schemes use fraudulent e-mails which attempt to direct consumers to counterfeit websites, often perfectly replicating legitimate business sites to trick recipients into releasing financial data such as credit card numbers, account...