Like
everyone else, I find spam annoying, but I also acknowledge that
unwanted sales pitches of one kind or another are ubiquitous: I also
find billboards, and commercials, and telephone solicitors, and every
other kind of time-wasting unsought sales promotion annoying. This is
primarily an education problem: Once customers all realize that it
makes more sense for them to
initiate commercial transactions, starting with research, and realize
that they have the power and knowledge to do so to their own advantage,
unsolicited sellers of all kinds will have to give up.
Phishing,
by contrast, is not annoying, it's dangerous. It's not overzealous
promotion, it's crime: fraud and theft. It is also, currently, harder
to filter, and becoming more sophisticated. The consequences of
allowing your credit information to be stolen by a phisher can be
catastrophic -- huge financial losses, loss of credit, legal expenses,
harassment by collection agencies for the phisher's debts, the major
time commitment required to cancel and re-establish stolen credit
lines, wholesale changeover of e-mail addresses and telephone numbers
etc. Victims not infrequently end up being charged with criminal acts
and even declaring bankruptcy.
Just in case there's anyone who
doesn't know what phishing is, in its simplest form it is impersonating
(called 'spoofing') -- usually via e-mail -- a company you deal with
commercially (banks, credit card companies, Amazon, eBay, PayPal,
VeriSign and Symantec are favourite targets), and fraudulently enticing
you to go to the phisher's site and enter personal financial
information which the phisher then uses to enter into financial
transactions for his own benefit, charged to your account. There are
several more sophisticated varieties of phishing as well. Sixty percent of phishing is attributed to criminal organizations in the US and China.
With enough familiarity, e-mail users learn that reputable financial and business organizations never
solicit such information via e-mail, and delete or even report phishing
messages to criminal authorities. But it's harder and takes longer than
deleting spam, for which filters at least can be set up. And for
occasional or new users of e-mail these messages, which often threaten
cancellation of credit or other penalties if you do not volunteer this
personal financial information, can be frightening and intimidating. On
the one hand they're told that supplying your credit card information
online to known vendors is common, safe and secure, and on the other
they're told not to divulge any information requested by e-mail even if
it appears to come from these same known vendors. If the digital divide
weren't wide enough already, an experience with phishers is enough to
make timid newbies throw in the towel entirely on e-mail and e-commerce.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group, which is supported by the most popular impersonation targets, is using 14 different methods to combat the crime. The one that seems to offer the most promise is called e-mail authentication,
and involves using methods to verify that the organization sending you
an e-mail is indeed who they say they are. These are still in the early
stages of development, and not yet ready to deploy to the public.
You
should of course never click on the links of phishing sites, even out
of curiosity -- sometimes just visiting these sites can infect your
machine with spyware and other malware. Traditional wisdom when dealing
with phishers is to report them
by forwarding (as an attachment) the phishing e-mail to anti-phishing
authorities, though I confess I get so many phishing messages now this
would take up most of my day. If you inadvertently provided credit
card, debit card or bank account data to a phisher, you should
immediately cancel the credit card or notify your bank about the
compromised debit card or account. Microsoft offers some additional steps you can take to reduce the risk and consequences of phishing.
There are some anti-phishing tools out there: Netcraft (be sure to read the tutorial on how to recognize a phishing site using this tool), EarthLink and SpoofStick. If anyone has used any of these (or other) anti-phishing tools and has comments on their value, I'd like to hear from you. |
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