New Phishing schemes

By now, most of you should have heard about phishing. If you haven't, it is a method by which some crooks steal a person's identity. As more and more people use the internet for everyday tasks such as banking, investing and shopping security is a very big concern. Phishing is where a cyber criminal sends an email to a person pretending to be a company that the recipient has done business with and requests the recipient to go to a website and verify their personal information. The criminal then takes all this information and then what ever they please with it. They can simply steal money directly from the person or they can apply for credit cards, loans or even mortgages posing as the victim. This has been pretty well documented elsewhere (click here for more on phishing) and most people by now know how to protect themselves from attacks, however, there has been a new twist to this crime.

When a criminal attempts to get your information they usually direct you to a website that looks like the website of your institution (say your bank) but the browser window still displayed information about the real site. It seems that now the criminals are able to use fake "chromes" this is the navigation bar, menu bar and border of your internet browser, making it more difficult to figure out what is fake and what is real. So here are some simple tips to help stop you from getting caught in this scheme:

1. No legitimate company will ever send you an email asking you to enter any personal information. If you receive an email and you think it may be valid, call the company and ask about it. Go to their website yourself by typing in the address in your browser (http:www.yourcompany.com)
2. Do not click on any links in emails from any company. For anything that relates to your acccount information always copy the link by highlighting it and paste it into your browser window. Many criminals make the link text say one thing but it actually goes somewhere else. Some links are not even text but images that hide the real link.
3. Ensure that whenever you have to enter any personal information that the browser address always is secure, that is it always says https and not http. If you see a lock on the browser, place your mouse over it and it will tell you if the site is secure.

No amount of software on your machine will protect you fully. Your vigilence is the only way to protect yourself. The internet is not something to be feared. It is a very important tool that should be used but there are always persons who like to exploit everything. So be careful and remember I'm not only the hair club president, I'm also a client. That's right, I was caught in this scheme a few years ago and lost a lot of money but I am wiser now and hope that my experience will not be yours.

More information on the new fake chrome scheme can be found here.