Phishing - the basics

Phishing - the basics

What is phishing? 

Phishing is a technique of obtaining sensitive data such username,password,credit card details etc by an attacker by claiming to be a trusted or genuine organisation/company. 

The most common type of phishing is Fake Login Pages. The basic methodology of this attack is written below

1.Suppose an attacker wants to hack gmail/yahoo/facebook/bank account of the victim. Attacker creates a fake login page of that website . This fake login page looks exactly like real/genuine login page.

2.Attacker then sends the link of that fake login page to victim through an email or any other means.The sender's email Id is usually spoofed to give an authentic look to it. 

3. Victim clicks on the link, fake login page appears in his browser and he enters his credentials in that page thinking that it is genuine.

4.The credentials that are username and password go to the attacker. Hence victim's account gets hacked.

5.Victim is then redirected to any webpage as chosen by attacker. Most probably the victim is redirected

to genuine website or a page displaying an error.

Let’s hope the idea is clear to you. This is the best method to hack anyone's gmail/yahoo/orkut/facebook/bank account.Creating a fake login page is very simple. Then it depends on attacker's smartness that how he manages to fool the victim to get his credentials entered in fake login page. Simply this attack depends on attacker's intelligence as well as victim's carelessness.

Countermeasuers :

The obvious countermeasure is that just don’t blindly enter your sensitive data in a webpage that exactly looks like genuine/real page. Carefully check the URL .But URLs can also be spoofed. The protocol must be hopefully https(secure) instead of http. If you still have doubts, you should check the digital certificate of the website. 

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