What is Phishing?

Phishing is a criminal act of stealing identity with the use of illegitimate website.  This authentic-looking website hosted by the spammer will ask for PIN, credit card or social security number.

As an example, a spammer will send out an email with a heading, “Western Union: Locked Account Notice”. This email will be sent by the spammer to millions of email addresses he/she harvested or bought from email harvester. This email will then direct the intended victims to a phishing website and ask them to input their social security or credit card number.

• Enable Phishing Filter and Pop-up Blocker in your Internet Browser. All YCS computers are set up to have this feature enabled, and just in case it is not, do the following on IE 7: Open the Tools menu, go to Phishing Filter, and then choose Turn On Automatic Website Checking .
  
• Do not give out your credit card or bank account number unless you are very sure of the website's identity. A legitimate website that solicits confidential information has an issued digital certificate from major certificate authority. Once you are re-directed to a secured site, the URL will change from HTTP to HTTPS.  The letter S indicates a security protocol that provides encryption and proper server identification  through the use of digital certificate.
  
• Do not send or post your email address to blogs, forums, newsgroups or chat. Spammers use special programs to harvest email addresses from websites and Usernet postings. (and there are also websites that collect email addresses and sell them) If you really need to post your email address for whatever reason, use Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Gmail or other free email services.


• Use BCC (blind carbon copy) instead of CC when forwarding email outside of YCS. There is a great deal of chance that email addresses of people you CCed  in your email will end up in the spammers' list if you are forwarding emails outside of YCS. Most email users have the tendency of not deleting email thread(s) when sending out their emails whereby exposing all email addresses you CCed.


• If you receive a too-good-to-be-true email, it is most likely a spam.  Discard it! The notoriety of 419 Fraud, a.k.a. Nigerian Scam is all over the Internet and on TV yet many people succumbed to this kind of fraud. Please verify the sender’s intent or story, on http://www.snopes.com/fraud/topscams.asp