Phishing and Pharming: Not Your Father’s Pastime--Reading Assignment Due Oct 13th

Instructions:

Your task is to read the following article on Phishing and Pharming: Not Your Father’s Pastime and answer the following questions in full sentences.

Article:
Phishing and Pharming: Not Your Father’s Pastime

As you graduate high school and get ready to go to college or start your career, bank accounts become a priority in life. You watch them and keep up with what expenses need to be paid and decide how much can be saved. Once college tuition, gas prices, book prices, going out with your friends, and other general account draining activities enter your life, it will be vital to keep tabs on your balance. You can accumulate a sizeable amount of money, but it can disappear in one fleeting moment. A quick and easy way for you to lose that small fortune is to be careless with your personal information and end up the victim of identity theft. Perhaps the most common type of online identity theft is phishing, and there are multiple forms.

Knowing the ins and outs of the forms will keep you safe in a dangerous online world. Phishing involves individuals sending information, usually through emails, in an attempt to gain access to
your private account. This may be bank accounts, Social Security numbers, user names and passwords, and other tidbits that may help a cybercriminal become you. These attacks will fool you into believing your account is in danger of being unfairly charged, that there is a problem with your account, or a fraudulent order has been placed. In every instance, there will be a link that supposedly directs the victim to the Web site that logs your information and “corrects” the issue. In actuality, the user has just freely given a cybercrook vital personal information that will be used to drain bank accounts or provide your identity to another individual for illegal purposes.

The second form of phishing is commonly referred to as malware-based phishing. Malware is software unknowingly installed on a user’s computer with the intent to upload a program that will do damage to your hard drive or provide the attacker access to your private data. The most common way phishers get you to download their malware is through infected links in emails. These links will be to pornography or, as mentioned in the section above, to your credit institution. In fact, by clicking on the attachment, you have unwittingly provided the attacker access to your hard drive. These are basically viruses and worms that will eat through your computer, taking what they want and in some cases, wiping your hard drive completely
clean.

A third way that cyber criminals can steal your identity is by employing a technique called Domain Name System-based phishing, or simply, pharming. It works in much the same fashion as phishing, but works different in that it creates a program that alters domain names for well-known sites. It will create dummy pages in the place of the actual site that once accessed by users, implants the monitoring software in the computer. This software will count and log key strokes in real-time. This will provide the recipient of the information every single Web site you log in to and every password you provide.

These phishers can take all this freshly amassed information and do one of two things, sell the information for profit or use it for their own means. Antiphishing.org, which is an online organization that devotes its resources to stopping phishing attacks, noted that a startling trend in online identity theft. In April 2006, there were 17,490 reports of unique phishing attacks. One year later, it noted more than 23,000 reports of this same type of attack. Online identity theft is not going away, and as the internet and our technology evolves, so too will the cybercriminals that are out to make a quick buck.

Questions: Part A and B

A) Defined the following terms in full sentences: ( /15marks)

1. Spam
2. Cyber crime
3. Pharming
   

B) Answer the following questions in full sentences: ( /30marks)

1. What is phishing?
2. What is identity theft?
3. Name one of the three types of phishing and explain.
4. What was the objective of this essay?
5. What does this have to do with privacy information and watching what personal information you put out on the internet?

Video Resources:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqRZGhiHGxg
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v3LpySRngg&feature=related
   
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0a6yo2ya3Q&feature=related
4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UddjreNhMEA&NR=1
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6tbUNjL0No&feature=related
   
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXxIXfa7-KI&feature=channel
7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qR7LQUUDX0
   
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NKhUPNOQp0