Phishing is better defined as a deceptive way to steal your web/personal identity and information like credit card numbers, passwords, bank account information and other details. These details are usually stolen via several ways like emails, pop-up windows or pages designed similar to popular websites that you use and much more.

There is nothing you can do against this Phishing except preventing yourself from the attacks, we all pretty well know that prevention is better than spam. Some of the best ways that you can protect yourself from phishing frauds are here,

1. Visit websites by typing the URL into your address bar:

If you are not sure of the email messages being sent asking you to identify your personal information from about your bank details and credit card numbers, never ever do the mistake of clicking the links sent, as this might be a personal identity stealer links. So always type the web address of your website on the web browser and is much safer to use https:// than http:// format. Nevertheless, if you are using Internet Explorer, you will find yourself having increased protection than any other web browsers against phishes. I am not promoting IE here, but personally IE can help you in identifying spam sites.

2. Never respond to emails asking for your personal information:

When you receive emails from your credit card company, bank, online payment service or other popular websites asking for your personal information, never respond to any and report to your service providers about these e-mails. These types of firms/service providers never ask details via e-mail as they know it is highly insecure.

For example, recently and quite frequently I have been receiving emails from Yahoo (not exactly but a phishing attack) asking to reveal my personal details like username, password and date of birth of Yahoo. I very well know that Yahoo will never do these things so I informed the Yahoo website about this phishing. The e-mail I got asked me to confirm my credit card details for the need of verifying my Yahoo id, this was a shit actually.  Following these Yahoo website developers raised their security levels and after that these emails are stopped now.

3. Review your credit card and bank statements:

The best way to prevent scammers from trying to steal your bank details is to review your bank statement and credit card statements frequently, may be once in a do is more than enough. This will help you to stop the scam by stitching in the necessary actions to save your account and hard earned money in time.

4. Check the website encryption:

Find out whether the website you are dealing with is encrypted or not, when you find that all the other checks fails to make your doubts of the website asking your personal details is trust worthy or not, then check whether the website in question is encrypted or not. Most of the trusted websites uses encryption while transmitting personal information, or in other words, they use encrypted transmission of information. You should be able to check this by seeing a yellow lock icon on the left side of the URL bar. Provide information only if the websites could convince you to be trust worthy.

5. Fail not to report:

This is a very important step as this helps not only you but also others. Whenever you find scams and phishing emails, it is important that you not only report the email as a spam but it is also important to report to the original authorities. If you get a phishing mails regarding your XYZ bank then do report to the XYZ bank authorities so that they will alert their other customers.

If you feel there can be more information added to the above list, then feel free to add it via comments!!

About Author:- Christina is a webmaster who is associated with Go-gulf.com, a web design Muscat company that provides web design solution in Dubai,Sharjah and Middle East.