Phishing : An Example Of Social Engineering Techniques Used For Financial Gain Identity

Another threat is Phishing, it is the fraudulent practice of sending emails pretending to be from reputable companies in order to lure individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.

Dhamija, R., Tygar, J. D., & Hearst, M. (2006, April). Why phishing works. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 581-590). ACM.

The phishing attack is an easy-protect attack method but may cause many losses when it success. All staffs of IT department of University XYZ have the responsibility to fight against it for preventing the loss of themselves and public sources. Remember to keep eyes on every suspect email. There are specific rules every staffs should follow with.

There are twelve major ways technology threatens your online policy today. The first of these threats is phishing. According to Riva Richmond, phishing is a ploy to gain personal information that will help people to steal your identity. Hackers will send you fake e-mails that

Phishing scams are typically fraud email messages appearing to come from legitimate enterprises (e.g., your university, your Internet service provider, your bank). These messages usually direct you to a spoofed website or otherwise get you to divulge private information (e.g., passphrase, credit card, or other account updates). The criminals then use this private information to commit identity theft.

The act of tricking individuals into divulging their sensitive information and using it for malicious purposes is not new. Social engineering attacks have occurred on the internet throughout its existence. Before widespread use of the internet, criminals used the telephone to pose as a trusted agent to acquire information. The term “phishing” has origins in the mid-1990s, when it was used to describe the acquisition of internet service provider (ISP) account information. However, today the term has evolved to encompass a variety of attacks that target personal information.

Phishing is a criminal activity using different variations of social engineering techniques. ‘Phishers’ attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information ( passwords, credit card info) by posing as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an IM (instant message) although phone contact has known to also have been used . The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to email and to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers (credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers' maiden names). Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person's details to create fake accounts in a victim's name and ruin a victim's credit, or even prevent victims from accessing their own accounts.

Phishing is a social engineering luring technique, in which an attacker aims to steal sensitive information such as credit card information and online banking passwords from users. Phishing is carried over electronic communications such as email or instant messaging. In this technique, a replica of the legitimate sites is created, and the users are directed to the Phishing pages where it’s required for the personal information.

Vishing is another technique for phishing. It is not always over the internet; in fact, most vishing incidents takes place-using voice technology. Vishing typically accompanied by voice over IP, landline phone, voice email, or cellular phones. Victim receive a message stating their bank account, or credit card, or there email account has compromised or a suspicious activity took place. User needs to call a specific phone number to ensure the fraud did not take place and verify their identity. The attacker can spoof the source to a bank or a trustworthy company that will make victim believe the call is legitimate. Vishing is typically a challenging information security threat specially if occur using voice over IP. Similar to

Two types of phishing attacks are spear phishing and whaling. Spear phishing is where the attacker takes extreme measures to gather specific information about an individual in order to make the attacks seem more legitimate. Whaling is generally spear phishing targeted directly at high profile individuals.

Fortunately, many solutions have been implemented to mitigate the negative repercussions of phishing, hacking, and piracy. For example, Anti-phishing software provides safety to consumers online by warning and preventing them from entering phishing websites. To consumer 's conveniences, anti-phishing software have been installed into most web browsers and email clients. Extensions and toolbars such as Netcraft can also augment the efficacy of successfully identifying phishing attempts. (***)

Phishing web page can be defined as “any web page that, without permission, alleges to act on behalf of a third party with the intention of confusing viewers into performing an action with which the viewers would only trust a true agent of a the third party.”

Phishing is a form of online data fraud that expects to take delicate data, for example, online managing an account passwords and credit card information from clients. Phishing tricks have been receiving far reaching press scope in light of the fact that such assaults have been heightening in number and refinement. As indicated by a study by Gartner, 57 million US Web clients have distinguished the receipt of email connected to phishing tricks and around 2 million of them are assessed to have been deceived into giving away delicate data. This paper shows a novel program augmentation, AntiPhish, that expects to ensure clients against mock site based phishing assaults. To this end, AntiPhish tracks the sensitive data of a client and creates cautionings at whatever point the client endeavors to dole out this data to a site that is considered untrusted.

Phishing can cause huge problems for organizations as it can lead to information being stolen and accounts being compromised. How phishing works is the suspect will set up a fake site of a real company pretending to be them asking for personal info such as name, number, addresses and maybe even bank account details. They will then send a link to the fake site to the targeted email of an organization or person, the user or employee will then go to the site thinking it is real because they have no knowledge of how to tell a real a fake website

A phishing attack takes place when someone masquerades as someone else to trick you into sharing personal or other sensitive information with them, usually through a fake website. Malware, on the other hand, is software installed on your machine often without your knowledge, and is designed to harm your computer or potentially steal information from your computer.