Advice against phishing attacks more and more people use the Internet to do their banking online or to maintain social contacts. With the disclosure of confidential data in the World Wide Web, but also the risk of becoming a victim of a phishing attack increases. The attempt is known as phishing, to get to the secret data of users with fake Internet addresses. Why this is even easier for hackers and how Internet users can protect themselves from a phishing attack, the news portal reveals news.de. The English word “phishing” is inspired by the concept of “password fishing” and referred to the “fishing for passwords with bait”. The phenomenon occurs not only with the latest technology (www.news.de/ technik.html) in appearance, the methods of the hackers are increasingly sophisticated.
From mid-2010, new routes will be open to fraudsters. Reason is the decision of American Internet Corporation for assigned names and numbers (ICANN), which allows for domain names in the future, the not restrict to Latin characters. So, for example, Cyrillic and Arabic characters are allowed as well as Web pages in Hindi or Mandarin. According to opinion of experts the risk will increase so much, becoming a victim of a phishing attack. Especially the Cyrillic language has similar characters, the letter “a” appears to be even identical to the inexperienced user. A serious fallacy, because the characters are encoded differently. Experts advise to provide any personal information on social networking sites. In addition the user should give the Web servers or IP addresses themselves rather than follow a possibly fake link.