Secure Today

PHISHING is a social engineering technique, which means to trick someone into believing something but different to what it really means, with a full purpose of obtaining personal information, credit card information and credentials.

The word phishing has been around since 1996. It was originally coined by hackers who started stealing AOL passwords by posing as a staff member and sending email messages to victims asking them their account information to verify their billing information and other information about their AOL accounts. The attacker lure, or fish the victims. This is when the word phishing began.

Although this social engineering technique had been around since the ’90’s it did not hit its popularity until the mid-2003. Phishing attackers, also called phishers creates very convincing emails requesting victims to click on links to update their account information. These emails and the redirecting website looks very closely similar to the actual website. Too convincing enough, a typical user would not spot the differences.

Some of the few tricks that these phishers would manipulate is to ask you to click on the link inside the email with a link almost the same as the actual website. For example, if you have an account with Bank of Alaska and their website is bankofalaska.com, they would create a site something like backofalaska.com. Or they would place @ symbol like bankofalaska.com@oursite.com. Before the @ sign would be the username following the http protocol. The actual website is oursite.com, which is a bad site. Depending on the way the site is written, the username can be ignored if it is not required.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you for visiting our site, our blog. Over the years, there have been several sites and blogs that I have started, supported, and maintained. Few of them have areas where I could share my ideas and knowledge about what I enjoy to do- Security. Two years ago, I wanted to start a blog about the same passion. Instead, I set up my own personal site, which includes a blog also, but seldom I had the opportunity to write articles that can be beneficial to others or just my own babbling that most people don’t even care.

Less than a year ago, in the comfort of my apartment in Austin, Texas, I began to develop onto my stage server. I wrote many small posts and less interesting articles. However, they did not make it to production. Since then, I moved to California and with my server got lost in transit by the careless Vans line company that supposed to take care of my belongings.

Few months ago, earlier this year, I restarted building the same idea and wanted to put it to production. By the way, the domain name have been purchased for years. Few of my colleagues showed interest and also would like to start sharing their ideas, opinions, and experiences through blogging. So here is our site and we hope it will, in some way or another, help you secure your assets today – to prepare for tomorrow.

Welcome once again and enjoy!