How to protect yourself from phishing scams ?

Here are a few simple precautions that you can take to avoid being a victim to a phishing scam:
1) Never update any personal or financial records by clicking on e-mail links. If you get an e-mail asking you to do so, ignore it. Phishers often use links within e-mails to direct their victims to a spoofed site, usually to a similar address such as "secure-mybank.com" instead of "mybank.com."2) If you really feel the need to verify the claims, warnings or statements made in the e-mails, open up your browser, type in the Website's main URL manually, and log into your account.
3) Look for secure Websites that start with "https" instead of "http." All secure Websites start with "https" ("s" for security) and if it does not, there are no guarantees on the safety of your information.
4) Look for a lock icon on the browser's status bar. This small and often unnoticed icon lets you check the level of encryption, expressed in bits, by hovering over the icon with your cursor. Note that the fact that the Website is using encryption doesn't necessarily mean that the Website is legitimate. It only tells you that data is being sent in encrypted form.
5) Report the message to the company that the message claims to be from. By doing that you will be alerting the company of the abuse of their brand, so that they can report it to the proper authorities and help keep other people from being ripped off.
6) Educate yourself. Banks or e-commerce companies generally personalize e-mails, while phishers do not. Learn to recognize a legitimate e-mail from a spoofed one. This may be hard to do sometimes, with the scammers continuously "upgrading" themselves, but it's absolutely necessary that you at least keep up with them. Let common sense guide you. If anything seems too good to be true, then it probably is.
7) Always check your critical accounts for any irregular incidents or payments. Check all your statements, and if you see any unauthorized transactions, get to the bottom of it immediately.
8) Never reply to spam e-mails, as this will give the sender confirmation they have reached a live address. The last thing you want to do is to provide encouragement to the scammer that his plans are working!
9) Always keep your computer secure by installing anti-virus software and keeping it up to date. By doing so, you will ensure protection against malicious software and be alerted of any intrusions by worms, Trojans, or similar dangers.
10) If you're on broadband, get a firewall. You'll need a firewall since your internet connection is on 24/7 and you're not always there to spot intrusions and illegal use of your bandwidth.
11) Update the security patches for your Internet Explorer browser, or better still, download Mozilla's browser called Firefox (http://www.firefox.com) which is reputed to be more secure than its Microsoft counterpart.
12) Arm yourself with browser enabled plug-ins and tools such as NetCraft (http://toolbar.netcraft.com/) and a lot more by doing a simple Google search for "anti-phishing software."
copyright @ Gobala Krishnan

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