Internet and Computer Safety

The growth of the internet and computer technology over the past years has led to the growth of cybercrime throughout the world. Scam artists use clever schemes to scam millions of people around the globe each year. Cybercrimes affects our daily lives as much as normal crimes. When internet scammer pretend to be a business to trick you into giving out your personal information, it’s called phishing. It could be as simple as a click on an email from an unknown source. Phishing scams happen in a variety of ways on the internet, which causes a large amount of damage. Since cybercrime is getting larger and larger preventing yourself from being a victim of these phishing scams is also important.

Phishing is a major crime that takes place frequently online and there needs to be a stop to this internet fraud.

What is Phishing? A type of internet fraud that sends an email to a user saying there from a legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into giving up private information. These includes theft of passwords, credit card numbers, bank account details and other confidential information. How Phishing Scams works, is when a user receives an email which appears to be from a financial institution, government agency, or other well-known agency. The message will convince you with a reason why you must "verify" or "re-submit" personal or confidential information by clicking on a link within the message. The link will take you to a financial institution or government agency which looks and feels almost as identical to the legitimate one, however in reality the website belongs to the scammer. Once inside the website the user may be asked to provide their date of birth, Social Security numbers, account numbers, p...

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...legitimate services will not ask you to provide or verify personal information thorough a non-secure place, such as email.

Phishing is absolutely wrong. Nowhere where phishing is not wrong and there are many laws against it. It is very unfair to go and trick someone into something especially with some who is not very familiar with computers. It is almost as if you are taking candy from a baby, it is not hard to do. Phishing targets people who have very little information or knowledge about computers and tricks them into giving them information, which is then collected and used. Just because someone has little knowledge about something does not mean someone should be able to take advantage of them and trick them into doing something. As our technology continues to grow, so does cybercrime. We can never end or stop cybercrime, all we can do is prevent it.