Phishing Not Fishing!

If you've ever found yourself in a technologically based conversation, either with your friends, family members, co-workers and the word fishing popped up during the talk you probably started to wonder why would someone be talking about fishing all of a sudden? Especially if the conversation revolved around computers? It's a fair question to ask if you don't what the term phishing is.

The words fishing and phishing both sound alike but have two very different meanings and are even spelled differently. What that one person in your conversation was referring to when discussing smartphones or mobile tracking was not the act of fishing, where you throw a fishing rod into the water in the hopes of catching a fish, but phishing, which is an attempt to steal your personal information through electronic communication.

It's very important that you are aware of the meanings of both fishing and phishing so you're never caught off guard in situations where somebody is talking to you about phishing and you think they're talking to you about fishing. That would be a very awkward conversation and one that's easily avoidable if you know a little bit more about phishing. Luckily we're here to help you know more about phishing not fishing so let us get right to it.

We already mentioned what phishing is but how does it happen? Well, it's usually carried out through instant messaging, e-mail spoofing and involves re-directing you to a fake website that looks almost like a legitimate website. Once you make your way to the fake website, whether it's a banking or ecommerce website, your computer becomes infested with malware and goes about trying to steal your personal information from you such as website usernames and passwords, and credit card information.

If you ever get a weird e-mail from a website trying to pass themselves off as a popular social website, online payment processing website or auction website passing along important information about your account you might want to stay clear of it. As long as you believe your accounts to be in good standing do not click on a link in an e-mail sent to you stating you have 90 days to get in on a class action suit in Canada or risk losing your money. It's more than likely a phishing attempt so be careful when treading through such virtual muddy waters.

Hopefully you have a much greater understating of what the term phishing is and what it's all about so that the next time you hear the word uttered you won't automatically think back to your days fishing.