PHISHING- A SOCIAL ENGINEERING TECHNIQUE AND WAYS TO DEAL WITH IT

In this era, where we are in a world which can't be imagined without use of technology in all facets of banking, the biggest challenge that needs to be addressed is various social engineering techniques used with mala fide intention, which costs people their hard earned money. There are various ways in which social engineering techniques are used to cheat people like phishing, baiting, spoofing etc.

- Abhinav Jain

Phishing

As the word phishing sounds as fishing, the meaning can be derived from that. In fishing as one attempt to catch fish from water by luring fish by some curious item, similarly in phishing a scamster try to lure the prospect victim over email, call etc. Phishing is one of the various social engineering technique used by cyber criminals to trick and deceive people. The term phishing dates back at least 25 years to the days when AOL was a big internet service provider. Some users would pretend to be AOL staff in chat rooms and trick other users into sharing passwords and credit card numbers. This was sometimes referred to as fishing for information (i.e. phishing).The first use of the term phishing seems to be from a hacker called Koceilah Rekouche, who developed an automated tool for tricking users in 1995. As a nod to the existing term phreaking, which related to people who played with, reverse engineered and hacked the telephone network, he called this automated fishing, or phishing.

Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or multiple targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing personally sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords or may be a PIN of the card. The information is then used to access important accounts and can result in identity theft and financial loss.

Some of the common feature of phishing mails are-

1) Catchy Subject Lines - Phishing campaigns typically aim to instill a sense of urgency using intense language and scare tactics, starting with the email's subject line. Common themes among phishing emails are that something sensitive, such as a credit card number or an account, has been compromised. This is done to induce the recipient into responding quickly, without recognizing the signs of a scam.