| What is phishing?
Phishing attacks involve the mass distribution of "spoofed" e-mail messages with return addresses, links, and branding which appear to come from banks, insurance agencies, retailers or credit card companies. These fraudulent messages are designed to fool the recipients into divulging personal authentication data such as account user names and passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. Because these emails look "official" up to 20% of recipients may respond to them, resulting in financial losses, identity theft, and other fraudulent activity (From antiphishing.org  )
Phishing is a variation on the word fishing. Criminals "phish" for personal information by setting out "hooks" and hoping that some recipients of their fraudulent emails will take the bait. |
There are many non-electronic types of Identity Theft. Take a quiz and learn more about ways to protect your identity here.
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In July 2003, the FBI called phishing the "hottest,
and most troubling, new scam on the Internet." Major corporations and their customers
have been targets of phishing attacks, including AOL, eBay, PayPal, Citibank,
Best Buy, MSN, Yahoo, Earthlink, and Bank of America. 
Example of spoofed email
Another fraud tool is keyloggers.
They are installed by computer users, viruses, or through another "holes"
in the computer security. Keylogger is a program that detects and remembers keystrokes
when you type any text on your computer. Eventually, stolen information is transferred
to criminals who use it to retrieve access information to your private data. What
is the RCRS attack? On 21 Nov, 2006 Chaplin Information Services
(CIS) has discovered a new
flaw in the Mozilla Firefox web browser that exposes saved passwords to clever
attackers. Given the new nature of this type of attack, CIS has named this a Reverse
Cross-Site Request (RCSR) vulnerability. This flaw could affect anyone visiting
a weblog or forum website that allows user-contributed HTML codes to be added. Sticky
Password Manager successfully prevents RCSR attacks. You can read more details
in the article
How
does Sticky Password protect me? 1. The first and most innovative
feature - is the Password Protector.
The Password Protector constantly
watches on how the passwords used on the computer. It works like firewall and will
display notifications if some application will try to retrieve passwords from
another application. Password Protector also watches for inter-process communications,
so it is effective to prevent keylogger and trojan-horse attacks.
You
can temporary or constantly prevent or allow the password-related operation. 2.
Sticky Password remembers the exact URL of an Internet resource when you stick
passwords to it. For example, if you stick the password to your eBay
account which has a URL like 'https://signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn......',
the password will not be remembered automatically if you open the "spoofed"
URL which visually looks like original: "https://signin.ebay.com:ws@somewebsite.net..." 3.
Sticky Password remembers unique program information preventing anyone
from entering passwords into programs that replaces their originals. For example,
someone can replace an ICQ client on your computer with another program using
a similar user interface. Sticky Password will not enter a password automatically
into the wrong window. 4. Sticky Password automatically fills login
and password fields to programs and web pages. This prevents the keyloggers
to stole your password or user name and any other person from seeing what you
type on the keyboard. You are technically not "typing" the password;
the program is entering it for your without countable keystrokes. 5.
Sticky Password offers a virtual keyboard. This Virtual Keyboard prevents
keyloggers from detecting keystrokes when you type in the master password. 6.
Sticky Password prevents RCSR attacks. Sticky Password will notify you
when web site will try to submit login information to the different domain than
you currently browse. 
More
features that will improve your computer safety are coming soon. | 
