Josh Freed wrote in his article "Security alert! Beware of scam email from Internet fraudster Josh Phreed " his definition of phishing: "computer-hacker lingo for luring "phish" close enough to grab their passwords in the Internet seas".

Like all of us who have e-mail accounts, he received a lot of fake "junk" e-mails from phishers and was amazed to see how professional all those mails and phishing sites looked like.

"What is virtual reality and what is phirtual reality?" asks Josh. Really, how can we make sure we are dealing with a legitimate mail from a bank, a school, a financial institution like IRS, etc.?

According to Apacs, the number of phishing attacks increased from 3,394 during the first three months of 2007 to 10,235 during the same period this year, 2008.

A lot of online firms have introduced severe measures to enhance the security of their services that consist in making it difficult to get to our personal accounts. These steps only lead to other problems: people cannot remember so many difficult passwords containing special characters and symbols. They forget them or write down somewhere where everyone else might get their hands on this piece of personal information. What can we do? The only advice is to keep on thinking up easier passwords containing words with numbers and special characters, like @ instead of 'a'.

Bank and financial institution sites have been warning us against opening any mails that allegedly came from them, and that is the only good security tip we can follow. Really, no bank or IRS sends out e-mails with requests to update some information. In case they need to contact us, they would make a phone call as they all know our phone numbers. However, there have appeared other scams, like VOIP phishing, when criminals phone you and introduce themselves as bank or IRS employees. How to make sure they are scammers or real employees? Remember, that no bank or IRS employee will ever ask you to give them your personal information, nor will they ask you for your credit card number, account details, and your passwords.

If you clicked a link in an e-mail 'from the bank', make sure the URL is not too long and does not contain '|-' symbols. If you see them, it is a phishing site. If there is no 'https', do not trust the site. If the page rank of the page is 'N/A', again it is not worth your trust.

Bottom line: keep all your passwords as simple as you can to remember them, never type in your secret data like credit card number or account passwords on web pages you opened from your e-mail, and never tell them anyone on the phone. Our tongue is our enemy...

Useful link:
What You Can Do to Report Phishing, E-mail Scams and Bogus IRS Web Sites