Yafoo Phisher

No, I didn't misspell the headline, it really does say Yafoo Phisher. Last week Japan made their first arrest in a phishing case against a man who set up a site, Yafoo, intended to look like Yahoo and steal information from unsuspecting victims.

I've been meaning to talk about "phishing" here on the blog for some time. A lot of people don't know what it is and aren't aware that this type of scam exists. Here's a great break down on wikipedia.org: phishing. In brief, phishing is an attempt to steal sensitive or personal information by masquerading as a reputable business. In the recent case in Japan, the site was Yafoo and people were tricked into believing it was Yahoo... it looked the same.

How big a problem is phishing? According to a Gartner group report from last year over 30 million adults have experienced a phishing attack and 1.78 million have fallen victim to one. I receive phishing scams in my in-box several times a day. Often they appear to be from Microsoft, Citibank or E-Bay and they say that there is something wrong with my account and that I need to fix it. But I haven't fallen for the bait.

What can you do? First of all, you should always be suspicious of all marketing, online or not. You should always take care to know who you are doing business with.

How can you tell if a site is who they claim to be? You could use the Alexa Toolbar. The Alexa Toolbar is the original anti-phishing toolbar and it can give you the information you need. For example, if you were to visit yafoo.com (Yahoo has taken over the page now) you could take a quick look at the Alexa Toolbar and see that it isn't Yahoo. You would see that yafoo is ranked in the millions, not #1, like Yahoo, and that the site has only 1 link pointing to it. Clearly not Yahoo.

The bottom line is this. Be careful. Be susipicious. Know who you are dealing with and use an anti-phishing toolbar.