Phishing

Phishing is a computer criminal activity that uses a special engineering as a disguise on a website in order to acquire credit card information, social security, and other important information about the user. The first use of phishing started as far back in the 1990s when AOL had to deal with the hackers signing on as employees requesting billing and other information from account users. AOL had to put out a disclaimer stating that employees of the company would not request such information from their customers.

The way phishers do their schemes, they take a website, like myspace.com for example, and create a spoof of their own where the URL link does not match. When a user signs on or clicks on something, most of the time it will mention about needed to be logged on to do something in which it proceeds to ask for your email address and password. The user would fail to realize that they already logged on in the first place, and type their information in, thus giving the hacker access to both their email and their password. The hacker will then use his or her Myspace profile to send out advertisements about stuff like free ring tines, lingerie, condoms, and a few other unethical things.

Some of the damages done by phishing is that the user loses control of their account first of all, and financial loss. It’s easy for most hackers to get to the accounts because of the passwords that users use in which some require their mother’s maiden name. The United States has lost up to $929 million, losing about 2 million a years as the clients become victims. Since the phishers have access to these accounts, they can do other things like max out the credit cards, create fake accounts using the victims name, get inside public records.

There are several ways to combat phishing. One method that the website Myspace is doing is to create awareness of how phishing works to its users by informing them what phishers do versus