Save the Fishing for fishermen, and Farming for farmers.

    

                          How The Fisherman Got Phished Himself

     One day Mr. Bass was swimming around, minding his business when a free, delicious dinner got waved in front of his face. Being a little skeptical, Mr. Bass swims closer and closer and possibly even a little nibble. Just as he decides it is safe and tastes good he gets ripped out of his home. That's when the trouble begins. In the meantime, after sitting down and enjoying a fish dinner, Mr. Smith was going through his e-mails and found one that announces YOU ONE THE LOTTO!!! Mr. Smith feels it sounds to good to be true, but it's a lot of money so he carelessly sends his personal information to claim his prize. One week later he found out his bank account is drained of his life savings and can't pay his mortgage so he has no roof over his head. It may be bad karma, but Mr.Smith had also been fooled by phishing. My little skit here may sound and look silly, but in 2012 there was an estimate of $1.5 billion (source: http://www.emc.com/collateral/fraud-report/online-rsa-fraud-report-012013.pdf) of global losses from phishing. Here are a few tips on how not to get hooked and I hope some stood out in my skit that were warning signs.

• Don't fall for it. If it sounds too good to be true, than it probably is.
• Notice the spelling of "won" is wrong, there are usually numerous spelling errors in scams.
• Don't EVER give out personal information to anyone requesting it in an e-mail. Banks, credit cards and such already have your personal information will never request it by e-mail. 
• Don't open e-mail attachments or click on hyperlinks from anyone you weren't expecting a message from. Malicious software is often hidden in these attachments. I couldn't stress this enough. I've studied for two years Computer Science and all of my professors will say the same. 

                                      Targets' Security Data Breach

I chose this video due to Targets' data breach being so recent and 40 million people felt the effects of it. I, myself, have not been a victim of any Internet or security breaches.

           
            No Good Can Come From Anything Rhyming With Phishing          

     Now that I have talked about phishing, which most people have heard of, I'm going to dive a little deeper talking a pharming, vishing, smishing, and spear phishing. To make this easy, pharming is a deceptive website. A good example of this would be www.rnacys.com and www.macys.com. One quick look at the first one and you might think it's a legitimate site. Look a little closer and it is spelled "r n a c y s". If you were to enter your credentials into this fake site, they now have your username and password. These sites can look idenitcal so beware. Vishing and smishing are similiar to phishing although vishing is a criminal act via phone to try and receive your personal information and smishing via text messaging. Spear phishing, again, the same as phishing but going after a particular good.

Infect my computer, I think not!

Now I felt this was needed to be shared this week considering I'm writing about how to avoid scams. I read about this in my book Cyber Crime Fighters, Tales From The Trenches by Felcia Donavan and Kristyn Bernier. 409 people willingly clicked on that ad that offers to give your computer a virus. This was just a test to see how many people would actually click on it, however, it didn't contain a virus.