The Art of Phishing

When it comes to online security and preventing against threats to your computer system in general. All we hear about are computer viruses, trojan horses, adware and spyware. These are all important and sure, you wouldn’t want your computer system infected with any of these malicious wares, but to me, they’re not the most serious threat by any means. For me, the single biggest thing that scares me online is a Phishing attack.

For those not in the know, a phishing attack is where someone e-mails you and diverts you to a website that appears to be something it isn’t. A good example is getting an e-mail what appears to be from your local bank. The e-mail looks perfectly formatted and branded using the banks logos and wording. You’d think it was legit. The e-mail then asks you to click on a link which takes you to a website, again often branded using your banks logo and colours. The website then proceeds to ask you to login using your bank account details for whatever reason. Of course, the website you’ve just entered your details into isn’t your bank at all and your access credentials and security information has just been forwarded to a hacker half way around the world.

Spotting these threats is tough and I myself have almost fallen for it a number of times. Especially when I get legitimate e-mails from my bank and credit card companies often. I consider myself fairly web savvy so can only imagine how many people who are not so clued up must fall for this tactic.

The only real way to check if the website is legit is to look at the domain name in your address bar. Make sure it is indeed your bank (or other online account) before entering your credentials. Also, make sure that the page is secured by looking for the padlock in your web browser status bar.

Anti Virus Software

The anti-virus software market is extremely popular. There are 10+ large players in the industry and no one company really has a monopoly on the others. This is quite rare when it comes to computer software in general. There is normally always one major player but in the anti virus and virus scanning software market, there isn’t. With that said though, all of the virus protection applications that you can buy off the shelf at your local software store do pretty much exactly the same thing, they protect your computer from harmful computer viruses.

With this in mind, it doesn’t really matter so much which brand you buy. All that matters is that you buy one with a good virus definition database and more importantly, buy an application that offers free, daily updates. Computer viruses change vast with new ones being released daily, so you need to keep up to date. Some applications I have seen in the past charge you significant amounts to update your various patterns and definitions. This is something you need to look out for.

All virus prevention and scanning applications offer the basic service of identifying viruses within your system currently and also alert you should you try and open a file that contains a virus. Some of the more advanced and ultimately popular virus scanning applications such as BitDefender also contain malware, spyware and adware protection elements that take virus scanning a step further than the traditional sense by protecting you against online and web based threads. Some applications also feature anti-phishing tools in order to stop you giving out your personal data to those pretending to be someone else such as your bank for example.