Embracing Technology

Phishing (Fishing) your online banking id and password

May 21, 2008 at 9:04 pm | Posted in Good to know, IT Security, Malaysia, Technology | 3 Comments
Tags: online banking, phishing alert, phishing email

 

“Phishing”, pronounced “fishing” is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. (As described in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing)

 

While a spam email is a norm and phishing emails targeting bank users in other countries are visible, phishing emails targeting Malaysian banks are still rare.

However, recently I have been receiving them with email Subjects like “Security Alert:Account Problem” or “Warning:Protect Your Account” targeting Malaysian banks’ customers.

 

If you still do not understand what is going on after reading up until here, “Phishing” is actually a tactic used by conman to pose as the actual bank, requesting for your login information, so that they can access your account. It is as simple as that, in layman terms. Usually, they do that by sending you emails and asking you to click on the links. The page will look like the actual login page, but it is really not.

 

While I am able to know that the emails are fake threats, I am quite sure some will fall into it. This is because its email content is quite convincing to some. Some people don’t even think twice before giving out their login info.

These are the emails:

 

 

Can you smell the fishiness?

 

The domain names or webpages are already not accessible by the time I checked my email and accessed them.

 

 

Online banking websites have also displayed warning messages to their customers so to not follow links from emails.

I hope that those warnings are working really well.

Some banks are displaying those warnings very prominently, while some are not as obvious.

These are some:

 

 

 

 

By now you should have noticed that there are no direct links to those phishing pages in this post, save for those in the images.

The main objective here is: DO NOT GET YOURSELF FISHED!

Do not click on those threatening links from email, even if the link shows a correct URL!

If you want to perform online banking, type the URL yourself.