Make your money making internet business a prohibited phishing area

Phishing is the new 21st century crime.

It can harm your money making internet business.

The word “phishing” is a variant of fishing and originally comes from the analogy that early Internet criminals used email lures to “phish” for passwords and financial data from a sea of Internet users.

Phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.

The damage caused by phishing ranges from denial of access to email to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the readiness with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers' maiden names.

While many high profile financial organisations and large Internet businesses have taken some steps towards increasing their customers’ awareness, most organisations have done very little to actively combat Phishers (in this way they are not protecting your money making internet business, for sure).

There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including legislation and technology created specifically to protect against phishing.

You can take steps to avoid phishing attempts by slightly modifying your browsing habits. When contacted about an account needing to be "verified" (or any other topic used by phishers), it is a sensible precaution to contact the company from which the email apparently originates to check that the email is legitimate. Alternatively, the address that you know is the company's genuine website can be typed into the address bar of your browser, rather than trusting any hyperlinks in the suspected phishing message.

Another popular approach to fighting phishing is to maintain a list of known phishing sites and to check websites against the list. Microsoft's IE browser, Mozilla Firefox and Opera all contain this type of anti-phishing measure.

Specialized spam filters can reduce the number of phishing emails that reach your inbox. These approaches rely on machine learning and natural language processing approaches to classify phishing emails.

Good luck!

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