If you have received a mail informing you that you are so lucky that you have won an x amount of money and in order to claim the same you have to click on the link, provided in the mail by following some simple steps. Beware. This is how phishing takes place. This phishing example also gives you an overview of what you should never believe. In fact these kinds of mails are to be deleted at the first instance.

Phishing is a way of stealing an individual’s personal information and use that information to steal money from their account. Nowadays, there is an alarming rise in the number of fraudulent activities. Though many activities are carried out against it but phishing still remains a major fraudulent activity as the criminals are also becoming equally clever. Though there are many       anti–phishing groups, laws and many technological developments which tell us about the different phishing techniques, there is a need to create widespread awareness about the phishing techniques and how to prevent it.

Online phishing is an online sinister activity. The same is also a criminal and punishable offence. In the united stated an Anti Phishing act was introduced in 2005. The act would have provisions for the Federal prosecutors to be fined up to $250,000. It would also have provisions for imprisonment of the accused up to 5yrs.  These were the efforts by the federal government to prevent phishing.

A lot of financial institutions now days, are opting for anti phishing training for their staff. For the simple reason that they do not want any kind of leakage of data to happen and also to educate them so that they may in turn educate their clientele on the said subject.

Talking of trainings, you must have heard about the normal procedures of training like an e-training module, class room training, offsite trainings so on and so forth.

What is Phishing?
As the technology advances it takes criminal technology too along with it. In the modern days of computers people try to find out an easy solution to all the problems they have using computers and so they have passwords, user names etc. The simplest definition of phishing could be that any activity which is done to steal these personal and confidential details is called Phishing.

In the modern days, some very common words that we come across are phishing attacks, credit card phishing, email fraud, online scams, identity theft online etc.

What are they?

These firstly are criminal activities, and they are categorized under cyber crime. They happen over the internet, and so are categorized under the cyber crimes. What happens is that critical details of people are stolen and used to make some financial transaction or with the simple motive to steal money from the victim’s account.