Phishing Sites - What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
Phishing as mentioned before, is one of the most common online scams. Here’s to resume yesterday’s post on What Is Phishing? And How Phishing Works
1. Never click on a link in your email that takes you to a log in page. Type the home site address into your browser if the site is one with which you are affiliated. Look for “https” in the address bar.
2. Online stores, credit card sites and banking sites should have a lock on their sites that shows they are encrypted. These show in the address bar after the page loads. Paypal is a good example of this.
3. Check for “Verisign” approval on the site. If you have never purchased from a site before, follow the Verisign link to see if the site is indeed verified as secure.
4. Check the address in the address bar. Just because you navigated to one page does not mean you will still be on that page when it loads. Make sure the address matches the actual address of the site you mean to visit.
5. If you are taken in and find that your passwords and user ID’s have been compromised, change your passwords as soon as possible and report it!
If you missed yesterday’s post, click here to read it: What is Phishing And How It Works.
You can protect yourself from phishing sites.
That is a point that I did not have in mind about checking the URL when navigating through pages to make sure that the page that was linked to is connected to the last one in a proper way. Getting linked out to a site that has negative intent is probably easy to notice if the URL is checked during the procedure.
Good post. Simple, easy to understand and protect oneself from phishing. Thank you.
[...] Checking for the “Verisign” approval: If you have never bought from a site before, the Verisign link will tell you if the site is verified as secure. [...]