Protect Your Identity

Phishing Holes

You've probably seen lots of phishing e-mail. Scammers forge the "from" field of a message so it appears to come from a reputable company like Citibank, EBay, or PayPal, to name a few of the more popular aliases. It urges you to click on a link in the e-mail to update account information for some alarming reason--often because the "company" suspects that the account has been tampered with. The link leads to a Web address and page that look credible, and all you need to do is type in your information and click Send.

Then the mayhem begins.

Armed with your address and your Social Security, bank account, and credit card numbers, plus any other information the phishers have gleaned from you, they can engage in shopping sprees and even establish a new address bearing your name, along with a series of new credit card accounts.

Even the more discerning tech-savvy consumer can be scammed, as phishers in recent months have gotten more sophisticated, relying on software to mask the Web addresses of their "spoof" sites with the addresses of legitimate pages. Thieves make perfect copies of logos and graphics from the legit sites they mimic, and even insert malicious code on top of a trusted site so that you go to the right URL but enter your information into a pop-up window the scammers provide. On MailFrontier.com, the Web site of an e-mail security company, users can test their knowledge of legitimate and fraudulent e-mail. On average, the more than 200,000 people who tested themselves on ten sample messages failed to detect at least three fraudulent ones. And that's when they were looking for them.