Phishing scams are being ranked as one of the most prominent threats on the Internet and are causing losses to the tune of billions of dollars to both the companies and customers, eventually deterring people to transact online. Phishing has to be dealt with appropriatelytechnically, legally and sociallyin order to maintain the credibility of the Internet as a viable and safe platform to transact. The article explains the common techniques used in phishing attacks and suggests a few ways to overcome them.

Crimes and criminals are unwanted but they are inseparable parts of today's Internet. With the Internet being widely accepted as a platform for both social and commercial activities, it has become a breeding ground for white-collar criminals and serious crimes. Hacking computer systems, jamming networks, defacing and/or hijacking websites, stealing passwords, listening information traffic of others' systems, credit cards frauds, and many more are very common types of cyber crimes encountered in the last two to three decades. The nature of these crimes was more of technical, where criminals used to find system vulnerabilities and launch an attack exploiting such vulnerabilities. Several warms and viruses like I LOVE YOU virus and Nimda series of warms have created havoc on the Internet resulting in loss of billions of dollars worldwide.

With the increasing technical sophistication of web tools coupled with ingenuity of cyber scamsters and criminals, a new genre of criminal activities have evolved in the networked society. In these crimes, the criminal not only uses the technical vulnerabilities but also exploits the human, social and emotional aspects of the victims to launch the attacks. In the cyber crimes parlance, this is called `Phishing'.

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