Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-As web connectivity continues to shrink the world into a global hamlet where we are all inter-connected through LinkdIn, Facebook, Gmail, Whatsapp, Wayn, Snapchat and various other social applications the danger stakes continue rising too.
New frontiers of conflict and criminality are rising current of which is a new hacking system called phishing.
The dilemma we all face with social media is that for it to be interesting we need to be as connected to as many people as we can, which however is the very ground upon which phishing flourishes.
In our desire to be connected, we are providing chances for hackers to hack into our email and social media accounts getting data and information that is very private to us.
Phishing basically involves the theft of data such as passwords or email accounts, or the spreading of viruses through bogus connections by hackers.
We all like getting friend request on social media but hackers are using that to launch phishing campaigns and social media has already been proved to be the most effective way to have victims clicking email links.
According to an MMR InfoSecurity report almost a quarter of users clicked a link to be taken to a fake login screen and out of that number, 54 percent provided user credentials whilst 80 percent downloaded a file.
The Global Fraud Report details that Sub-Saharan Africa has the third highest exposure to cyber fraud incidents in the whole world.
This can easily translate into meaning that at one time you have met a fake request.
This rise in phishing calls for vigilance whenever one is online and precautions include not clicking just about anything that pops up especially strange offers of winning.
The creation of strong passwords is also vital.
Experts actually dissuade people from using obvious passwords such as birth dates and names. Hackers can easily manipulate that.
As a counter measure Google recently countered a new effective phishing scam which in recent months impacted users of the Gmail email service.
According to a Fortune publication scammers had been tricking people into divulging their passwords by directing them to lookalike login pages that tripped no alarms in the victim’s we browser.
“Google has responded to the problem with an update to its Chrome browser where the browser warns the user when they have been served a page that uses a phishing trick.
The revamped version of Google Chrome now displays “not secure” and it’s incumbent upon the user to heed that warning or ignore it.
“Previously scammers had been sending people fraudlentemail messages from the compromised accounts of known contacts. Inside, the notes included embedded images designed to look like PDF attachments that, when clicked, opened a bogus Gmail login pages”
Everything would look normal on the fake login pages except for a bit of unusual text “data:text/html,” preceding the usual https://..
The trick here was in exploiting the distinction between a URL and the less common “data URI”.
Whereas a URL is a web address allowing users to interact with it a URI embeds a file when you click it.
This situation is worse when using open Wi-Fi where they are so many popping up tabs offering you unrequested options and the inclination is to click on some of them, but forewarned is forearmed, that will be to your detriment.
Other people have suddenly found their accounts inundated with pornographic material whose origin they could not account for.
Another countermeasure is simply staying clear of ‘not secure pages’.
And always check to make sure you’re transacting with the intended website before entering a password.
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