Fishing usually involves the dangling of bait in a substantial body of water to entice and attract fishes to bite.  When a fish take the bait, it usually gets reeled in at great personal cost, quite often its life.

Similarly, phishing is a social engineering attack in which users are tricked into biting the bait and revealing personal information which may result in identity theft, financial loss and compromised confidentiality of information.  The most common baits used in phishing attacks are emails and websites; claiming to represent legitimate enterprises, making sincere requests to the unsuspecting email reader or web surfer.   The next few articles in this series will define and describe the variety of attack categorized as phishing while examining some of the most common anti-phishing techniques used to mitigate these types of exploits.

Statistics show that phishing attacks though simple in design have increased exponentially in recent years.  Continue reading “PHISHING – Part 1” →