Phishing and How Can You Avoid It?

What’s Phishing?

The term phishing isn’t the ordinary form of attack such as a virus, malware etc. it’s a type of cyber-attack used by criminals on many occasions. It is send from one end (snoopers) towards their respective targets to make their lives a living hell. Be it personal or work life, it all goes down the drain. The threats usually travels through emails but now, it is also emerging from social media, apps, messaging services etc. Such an attack convinces you to hand over the password to the intruders that lets them hack the company’s database, transfer funds using the bank details and more.

The objective and mechanics of the scams are of different types. Users who later become victims are tricked into tapping on a link that leads or redirects to an unoriginal/fake webpage that convinces them to handover the information as it seems ‘reliable’. To be precise, about 1.4 million of such kind of sites are created every month to keep this process going on for eternity.

Apart from this, other campaigns also exist like convincing users to install malware, download ransomware and other means of getting infected quickly for regular profits.

How Does It Work?

The average attempt of phishing confuses the user into providing the necessary details, confidential information, email records etc. are the common ways of extracting the data.

The average number of mails sent each day explains that email is a useful tool used for convincing purposes by cyber hackers. A total of 3.7 Billion forward almost 269 Billion emails each day which is a very large number.

A research suggested that almost 1 in every 2000 of emails is termed as a ‘phishing’ email which means, almost 135 million attacks are sent each day.

Most users do not really have the time to analyze each mail that lands in their inbox which is a way used by hackers to exploit in numerous ways.

Ways To Prevent Phishing Attempts

Avoid clicking on links:

Most emails contain a starting information where someone is giving you their entire inheritance to you and asking you to only click a certain link, image, attachment etc. if you do not know the sender, avoid tapping on any such links.

Avoid discussing financials on email: 

Be it trustable or not, try not discussing your private, confidential financial information as there is a solid chance of losing it one way or the other. Even your account number mustn’t be shared through this method as with that, anyone can do wonders without your consent.

Stay away from pop-ups:

• Avoid all pop-up screens and do not add private information in it
• Don’t click on pop-up screens
• Never should you copy the addresses of web from pop-ups into your browser

Check the security of the site:

It’s better to be safe than sorry and hence, if you are able to check the validity of the site, you would be in a better situation of either being careful or being relaxed. You must make sure the site you’re accessing has ‘https’ secured format located at the starting of the browser’s bar.

Conclusion:

Know that to avoid such kind of attacks, it totally depends upon you as if you’re a bit careless, you would be punished but if you’re careful, you can easily avoid all such threats. This is because a phishing attack in majority only enters your system once you click on a suspicious link and if you don’t, you stay away from the trouble. In short, avoid clicking on un-trustable links and always stay one step ahead of the hackers, intruders, snoopers etc.

Author Bio :

James Williams is the Lead Content Strategist at Newsoftwares.net and loves to write alot. His main interest is in web related threats, phishing scams and social networking hoaxes