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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

February - 2005 - issue > Cover Feature

Phishing

Harish Revanna
Monday, November 17, 2008
Harish Revanna
“It’s not common in India,” says the analyst. Phishing, phonetically “fishing” is the next profit market for online scammers of India. The word means fishing for important data among Internet users through baiting-emails. The spelling is brutal evidence portraying the earthy innocence of an illiterate phisher-men when it came to spell words, and pronouncing—a bigger ordeal.

Phishers are still not even a decade old, and they are growing with the Internet. Even if your country is not Internet savvy, phishers are sitting in your inboxes to phish you out. With a mere 1.7 percent of Internet penetration in India today, 60 percent of the emails received are packed with junk, says Niraj Kaushik of Trend Micro India, an anti-virus developer.

As e-commerce and the Internet banking systems in the country gain momentum, the risk of information leakage is mounting. Although the country’s organized cyber crime-stars are many, international scammers are making invading to every country possible, by scouting usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other private data. For this coveted information, the scammers are eyeing corporate email Ids that are the entryway of private information.

The process of phishing begins with a luring mail in your Inbox, embedded with links to a spoofed website and often the actual website. By providing a link to the actual website, the authenticity of the email is confirmed and there are possibilities of users providing confidential information. Sometimes, even just clicking the link can allow viruses to infest your computer and infiltrate your data, and transactions.

In a recent research conducted, Citibank had the 628 attacks worldwide. Baazee, an online retailer also had complaints of phony email its customers received, baiting them to enter his confidential username and password. While most of the financial institutes and online trading portals today are suggesting its users log in personally to their websites and not through an email link, some have even explained the test’s self-administration—like the subtle difference in websites with “https” and “http” Here, the letter “s” represents security.


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