What You Can Do to Protect Others from Phishers

(if you have not read the description of what phishing is you may see it here).

Helping Protect Others from Phishers

By reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups, such as PhishTank, you can help to protect others from phishers.

Other anti-phishing methods have been developed, and have been included in web browsers, toolbars, and as part of web page login procedures. A few examples are as follows:

• Since phishing is based on the phisher pretending to be someone or someone or something else, one can prevent it if one can recognize whether a site is reliable or not. There are toolbars available that display which site one is really on.
• Firefox allows you to type in "petname extensions" and make your own labels for websites that you visit. Using this function, you will be able to recognize if you are on the right site or not, when you go back there later. If the site is false, the software will either warn you, or block the site. (You can download Firefox for free with the link at the bottom of this page.)
• Another method used by browsers is to keep lists of clean sites and lists of known phishing sites and, to verify websites against this list. To date, Firefox has been found to be the most effective at detecting false sites (according to software testing companies).

There are other methods of countering phishing attempts, but this is the basic picture. Aside from a few computer programs that make it harder for phishers to target you, the main weapon to use to combat phishing is an awareness of the phenomena. With this, one can recognize it where it occurs, and avoid falling into the trap.

You can help, by making others aware of phishing, and of the methods used in order to gain access to personal information.

I have attempted to write this article in such a way that anyone can understand it.

Please feel free to distribute links to this article, so that others can also be aware, and less susceptible to phishing.