What is Phishing? How do I protect myself from it?
Phishing is the act of sending an e-mail to a user while falsely claiming to be an established, legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information, which will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has.
What can I do to protect myself?
The best way to protect yourself is simply to be skeptical. If you receive an e-mail from a place you do business with stating they have lost your information, do not be afraid to contact that business directly! Another good way to see if this is a scam or not would be to view the source code of the e-mail.
If the e-mail says you need to go to EBay to update your card information, view the code of the HTML in the e-mail to see if it REALLY is taking you to EBay.
In most e-mail readers, viewing source is as simple as right clicking and selecting, "View Source."
An example of what to look for would be:
< a href="//123.456.789.012/custreg.html > BobsVisa.com < /a>
Note that it looks like you are going to BobsVisa.com, but you are really going to //123.456.789.012/custreg.html
In the E-mail itself, without viewing source, the previous line would look like:
Try viewing source on this page and looking for BobsVisa.com to find out where it really takes you.