Phishing is a fraudulent attempt, usually made through email, to steal your personal information. The best way to protect you from phishing is to learn how to recognize a phish.

Phishing emails usually appear to come from a well-known organization and ask for your personal information — such as credit card number, social security number, account number or password. Often times phishing attempts appear to come from sites, services and companies with which you do not even have an account.

Phishing is an online scam used to commit identity theft. A fraudulent, but official-looking e-mail is sent to a user in an attempt to con that user into divulging personal and/or private information, which is then used for identity theft.

Phishers spam huge numbers of users with a seemingly credible e-mail that instructs the user to visit a Web site (also fraudulent) where they are prompted to enter or update their personal or private information (such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers). Phishers also use pop-ups to try and scam users into entering sensitive information.

A phishing scheme typically consists of an email message that appears to originate from a trusted source, but instead is an attempt to obtain and exploit sensitive user information, such as login credentials for the targeted user's online bank account. Often, the message asks you to "update" account information (including credit card and checking account information, social security numbers, addresses, and telephone numbers). Most phishing scams instruct you to do so using a form in the body of the email. Sometimes, you will be prompted to click a link that appears to lead to an authorized Web site that belongs to a legitimate, trusted company.

In its most basic form, 'phishing' is the use of spam email messages that ask you to divulge your bank account details. For more information see What is phishing? in the IT Services section.

A phishing email, if clicked, will open up to an insecure site. Every site that uses security encryption will have the HTTPS protocol at the beginning of the URL. Did I lose you? The HTTPS is a great way to instantly identify a phishing scam - no matter how legit the website may look, if it doesn't have the HTTPS at the beginning of the URL, it's not for real.

Misspelled words in the site's URL address. A quick tip off that a phishing scam is underway is if the name of the site is misspelled in the site address; for example, www.gooogle.com.

Phishing is the use of fake email and websites to trick a user into supplying confidential or personal information. These emails appear to be from a reputable organization and would have a link to a replica website for that organization. Any details entered (bank account details for instance) into such a website are stolen by those who created the website.

No institution will ever send an email requesting login details. In the unlikely event that you do receive an email from a financial institution requesting such details, contact them directly via your statement contact details (not the ones in the email) to check prior to responding. In general, any email requesting personal details it is not to be trusted. If you receive such an email, contact the sender directly to confirm the request and do not reply to the email.

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