Protect Yourself against Phishing Attack in 3 Easy Steps

Phishing is a neologism derived from the word fishing, and like fisherman a phisherman (there isn’t any such word, perhaps) also throws the net out to encircle innocent fishes like you.

Enough of figurative sentences, let’s get it straight now.

Phishing is any attempt to provide you misleading information in order to make you click on a link and/or enter your personal or financial details. Many people fall prey for these techniques as the website they are send to resembles the original ones in every sense, but one— the URL of the website. In many cases it is misleading or simply something else. I will talk about such issues in the coming paragraphs.

3 Steps to Protect against phishing

Step 1: Sniff it

Indeed, this is the first thing to do. You need to be very careful of the mails you receive from a sender claiming to be from your credit card company or your bank or whichever website you go to. These are phishing net used by identity thieves to make you click on the link sent to your mail. See the sender’s name and e-mail ID before clicking on the link because it may not be coming from where it claims to come from. We discussed this above, didn’t we?

Do not take mails asking for your username or any other details lightly. Call your bank and inform them about the incident as it happens. Even if you have to go to bank’s website, go from the URL you already have bookmarked, or use Google to find the URL of your bank. NEVER, never click on the link sent to your mail.

Step 2: Check URL

I am talking about URL here again because no matter how identical a website phisherman creates, it cannot get the URL of your bank—unless it is hacked, chances of which is very less, as the banks run on secure server. Check the address bar of your browser—address bar is a place where you enter your URL— and see where you are, also look for https prefix and a padlock sign in the status bar of your browser.

Step 3: Keep the browser security on

Web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and even Internet explorers (recent versions) do have a built-in phishing detection mechanism that analyze webpage you are opening as well as check the URL in its database containing blacklisted URLs. By default it is tuned on. Do not disable this feature. Follow the recommendation given by the browser, and do not visit suspicious websites.

Follow these steps, and you will be safe from phishing attacks that use your e-mail inbox and a fake bank’s ID to steal your personal as well as financial information.