Phishing

“Phishing is a ruse designed to gain sensitive information from an intended victim by way of e-mail and Web pages or letters that appear to be from genuine businesses, that command the potential victim to supply information to prevent an account from being closed, or as part of a promotion or give-away called a gimmie.” (Workman 2008)
As Workman states above, phishing is a ruse to obtain information or money from unsuspecting people. We have all seen this type of scam in the junk folder of our email. These kinds of emails are the ones asking for money to be sent to Nigeria or an from your bank asking you to confirm some piece of information. The term has been around for several years but it is growing in popularity and in everyday language. It has also grown in its sophistication; it is a science that can be quite fruitful if you are good. It is always a good idea to be vigilant and skeptical of anyone asking for any piece of information.
It can be easy to fall prey to some of these as they are getting more and more convincing every day. When in doubt, doubt even more. It is recommended that you do not click on the links provided in emails but instead enter them in manually to avoid spoofing a link. As we learned in the 6.2 assignment we can add any name to the link we create. We can create the link name as www.mosttrustedsiteever.com but set the link (a href=) to www.givemeyourcreditcard.com.


References
Workman, M. (2008). Wisecrackers: a theory-grounded investigation of phishing and pretext social engineering threats to information security. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(4), 662-674. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Chris V.