What is phishing? Phishing is any attempt to steal online data by misrepresentation of a trusted source or person.

People conduct phishing by posing as celebrities, using scare tactics to intimidate others to take immediate action, making fake websites that look like the official site, and many other ingenious methods.

Here are some common ways to phish and ways to avoid becoming a victim:

1. Emails are one of the more common ways to phish. Criminals send phishing emails en masse and hope for even a few victims to fall for them out of carelessness. If an email is unexpected, always verify the sender’s email, the grammar in the email, and even call the company or person if applicable to make sure that they sent the email. Check to make sure the information in the email is correct. Also, some companies say they will never email you to ask you for your information. As a general rule, companies do not ask for sensitive information via email such as bank account passwords.

2. Website phishing is another method, in which criminals design websites that look like the actual website, for instance Bank of America’s website, in order to take bank account or other private information when people try to log in. If a website feels different than normal in any way, first make sure the URL is correct in the navigation bar. Also check for the website’s digital certificate and whether you have visited the website before, both available on the browser Firefox. Banking websites should always use HTTPS, represented by a green lock in the navigation bar. If you realize you have fallen victim to a website’s phishing form, immediately change passwords for the accounts you gave away to the phisher and let the bank know what happened so they can take action.

3. Social media phishing is more funny than dangerous, but still a potential threat. People can do this one of three ways:

First, they can pose as a celebrity and try to coerce fans into giving them things. However, these accounts are obvious by their low number of followers/page likes/etc.

They can also pose as your friends by ripping their data from their page and creating an account that looks just like theirs. Countering these people is as easy as asking your friend if they actually made a new account.

They can also phish by using your friends’ actual accounts, but at this point you should know to be careful with any suspicious links. Again, call the friend to let them know they were compromised as soon as you see it.

To conclude, online phishing is a danger to literally everyone, but especially dangerous when banking information and private accounts are involved. Never input data carelessly into online forms; always double check that the website is indeed the official one. If you notice anything different, even if you can't pinpoint exactly what, take a moment to check the URL of the website and whether you have visited the website before. If you are lazy and don't want to do this stuff there are add-ons in Mozilla Firefox to help protect you against phishing, as well as features built into the browser to let you know whether you've been to the website before.

There are other ways of phishing such as DNS poisoning that I have not gone over in this because they are too advanced for the normal user, but feel free to Google these terms or ask me about them.