Phishing Protection

Phishing (pronounced in the same way as fishing) is a social engineering attack which attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive personal information, such as passwords and/or credit card details. Usually this is achieved by sending e-mail (or similar communication) masquerading as a trustworthy person or business with an apparently legitimate request for information. The most common Phishes look as though they come from popular high-street banks, and usually contain some sort of threat of discontinuation of service, or other undesirable consequence if the instructions are not followed. Sometimes a the mail will look very genuine, and will contain branding and content which may have originally come from the source that it is impersonating. Usually there will be a link in the mail that will take the recipient to a website (which also may look very much like the legitimate site), and this site will be used to capture the details being 'phished'. It is important to remember that banks, and legitimate companies like Ebay or PayPal will never request usernames and passwords in unsolicited email. It is also worth bearing in mind that the links in phishing emails although they may look legitimate, will almost always point to a different site underneath. Always open a new browser session and type the correct address into the Address bar when you are trying to get to your internet bank or other online services.