One of the methods of fraud in the Internet world is phishing. But what is a phishing attack? By using phishing, hackers can gain access to users’ important information, including their banking information. Phishing attack is one of the most common cyber attacks. In this article, we discuss what phishing means and talk about the techniques of this attack.

What is phishing?

What is a phishing attack? The meaning of phishing is a term to describe stealing from an individual or a group of users, using sending emails or creating poisoned pages. These emails and pages are created to collect users’ personal information such as bank account information, email account information, and other user information.

The meaning of phishing in simple language, which is actually a summary of the phrase Password Harvesting Fishing means hunting the user’s password through a bait.

Attackers (phishers) who use phishing attack collect confidential information of people with different techniques. One of these methods is to create fake pages and refer users to those pages. Because these pages are designed similar to the main pages, users trust them and enter their personal information on those pages.

In the rest of the article, we will examine different phishing attack techniques.

What information do phishing sites want from the user?

In this article, we are going to talk about phishing, how to identify phishing attacks and how to deal with it. As you know, there are always lawbreakers who attack the rights of others in various environments to seek more profit. In fact, the virtual space and the Internet are not free from the existence of such people. Phishing is a term that refers to a group of these attacks that are carried out with the aim of obtaining confidential information of others. One of the important information that attackers usually look for is the password of different accounts. In addition, username, bank account number, date of birth and many other confidential information are among the things that phishing sites seek to find.

What are the different techniques of phishing attacks?

Below, we will briefly review some phishing techniques, phishing methods and phishing risks, and you will get to know more about the meaning of phishing:

The phisher (attacker) creates a poisoned page and directs users to that page in various ways (such as email). After establishing trust, it asks them to enter their confidential information on those pages. For example, for online shopping, it sends the user to a poisoned link to enter his bank account information on that page and bank account phishing takes place.

Spear phishing technique:

In this method, the attacker tries to get as much information as possible about the victim in order to win his trust. 91% of phishing uses this method. This method applies to groups. This means that instead of sending e-mails to thousands of users, the phisher sends so-called mass e-mails (e-mails to a specific group that he has previously identified).

What is clone phishing?

In this method, the phisher receives an email sent by the desired company and replaces the links in it with the desired links. Then he sends the email to the users of the same company.

What is Rogue Wi-Fi or wireless phishing?

The attacker creates a site with free internet, dominates all users in this space and tries to steal their confidential information.

Link manipulation method:

In this method, the phisher sends a wrong but similar link to the user. For example, instead of the link: example.com, the address of example.com will be sent to you.

Filter evasion technique:

Phishers have recently started sending pictures instead of links, which makes it harder for anti-phishing.

What is phone phishing?

Not all phishing occurs over the Internet. Recently, phishing by sending text messages or by contacting users has also become extremely popular. In this method, messages are sent to the user that appear to be sent by the bank and ask the user to dial a specific number, for example, due to a problem with their account. After getting the number (which belongs to the phisher and is provided by the VOIP service), the user is asked to enter their account number and second password. Or by sending a text message, the user is asked to go to the ATM to receive a gift and enter codes in the English section of the machine. The result of this case is the transfer of money to the fisherman’s account and the account has been phished.

What is the technique of Evil twins in phishing attack?

This is one of the methods that is difficult to distinguish. The attacker creates an Internet line in public places with the name of that place. that users make a mistake to log in and in this way the attacker will gain access to personal information.

Of course, there are other methods such as Whaling, Website forgery, Tabnabbing for phishing. Below is an example of a phishing page that can help you understand what phishing means:

For a user who regularly uses eBay or any other online service, this email can be a simple question from the user to explain his user information. Of course, phishing emails are for stealing information such as username and password, bank account information, etc.

What is email phishing?

Since phishing emails are sent in bulk, they have no idea who you are, so you may have an account in Bank Tejarat, but an email from an account with the name of Bank Mellat with the theme of entering information User has been sent to you. If something like this happens, that email is definitely fake.

How to prevent email phishing

• Reputable companies never have misspellings in their emails.
• If a certain company requests you to correct your information due to a disruption, it will definitely refer to your username or account information. In the example above, it is enough to say eBay customer, if this email was really from eBay, it would definitely use your username.
• Usually, such emails have a deadline. For example, in the example above, the user is asked to login and change user information in the next 24 hours.
• Although phishing emails are getting better and better at hiding links every day, they usually include a list of links unrelated to the company’s website. In the example above: com/ebay is not an eBay address. It’s a fake address with the eBay name in it…

The points that phishing emails generally refer to

Account problems such as password expiration, account hacking, or the expiration date of your account, for these reasons, you need to update your account.

credit card or other personal information, such as saying that your information has been stolen or that you need to change your password.

Confirmation of user information: For this, they ask you to log in to the system from their link and confirm your information.

Examples of companies that carry out phishing with their names

• Domestic banks
• Popular websites
• Government websites and phishing programs
• Internet servers
• And…

The difference between farming and phishing

In farming, a large number of users are attacked and actually become victims. In this case, there is no need to confirm the victim user in the victim system, and there is no need to send emails to users individually. In fact, farming is done by changing host files on the victim’s computer or by exploiting DNS server vulnerabilities.

Several ways to identify phishing attacks

Of course, in order to be able to deal with phishing attacks well, we have to recognize them in the first step. Here, we have mentioned a few ways to identify a phishing attack:

• Check the secure connection: When you enter the website page for online payment, pay attention to the address bar. Make sure that the address of the page starts from the left side of the address bar, with a lock symbol or the text https://. We can boldly say that the presence of these signs makes us feel at ease that the site is not fake, but pay attention to the important point that this case is not 100% correct?! There are other points that you should keep in mind.
• Read and check the site’s domain address carefully: in fact, sometimes attackers just add or subtract one or two letters from the original domain address to make the fake address look normal. So, make sure that the address written after https:// or the lock symbol must match the address of the main site.
• Play the role of the forgetful! At the time of entering account information for online payment, assume that you have forgotten them and enter incorrect information. For example, enter the card number or other information incorrectly. Here, what happens is that the original site realizes that the information is incorrect and warns. However, the fake and fraud site, because it is not connected to the central bank system, does not notice this mistake and does not show you an error message. So, you will easily find out that the site is fraudulent.
• Get help from software: You can install an anti-phishing plugin on your browser. With this, most of the checks are done by the plugin. The desired plugin will automatically check the authenticity of the site and if the website is detected as fraudulent, a warning message will be displayed.
• Refresh the payment page: As you know, many payment pages have a keyboard with irregular number order for more security. One simple sign is that refreshing a cheat page doesn’t change the layout of the numbers on the keyboard.

What are the ways to deal with and prevent phishing?

Now that we have learned about some methods of identifying phishing attacks, it is time to deal with them. It is clear that carrying out the same steps and identification methods is the most important step in preventing and dealing with such attacks. However, there are other steps you can take to protect yourself from phishing attacks. Some of these actions are:

Never click on links sent to you by email. Instead of entering the link provided in the email, manually enter the name of the company and enter its website. In the example above, instead of entering the fake url, you can enter the com name yourself and enter your account.

Never send your personal information via email. If a company requests you to send your confidential information or declares that your account is inaccessible, go to that company’s page and log in and send information through that.

Never enter your information on untrusted sites. Regarding bank sites or sites where you are going to enter your bank information, first make sure that this site has an SSL certificate or its address starts with HTTPS. All sites can secure their site against such cases by purchasing SSL.

Usually, attackers use tempting content to trick you. For example, they send content such as bank loan payment, gift giving, online auction, etc. Our advice is not to get excited and do not click on any link with these titles.

Put a special bank card for internet work: try to keep this card empty and transfer the required amount of money to that card only at the time of purchase. Of course, we remind you that the best way is to recognize fake pages by learning how to identify phishing attacks and not to enter any unknown links.

In the end, we hope that the said content has been useful and that you can avoid falling into the trap of these fraudsters by acting intelligently.