What is Phishing and Types of Phishing

Phishing
Phishing is an e-mail fraud method. In Phishing an intruder(phisher) sends an email legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients.Mail seems to be from the well  known company and lure victim to input their personal information.Phishing is a easy and common method used by intruders to get access to victim's account information.
It is also referred to as brand spoofing or carding,is a speculative venture: the phisher puts the lure hoping to fool at least a few of the prey that encounter the bait.

Types of Phishing attacks..

• Smishing:-

Smishing is a combination of SMS and phishing as the mode of fraud is the Short Messaging Service (SMS) in this case. It is also known as SMS Phishing (SMiShing) and is the social engineering scam which the attackers use to attract the users.

How Smishing Works?

Any user can receive an email containing invalid URL looking to be legitimate.The URL may lure a user by providing him some attractive reason to visit through that URL and when user visits the URL may ask for personal information or would download a malicious program on the victim's system.

• Vishing:-

Vishing is the combination of the terms “Voice” and “Phishing” as it incorporates the use of voice for phishing people.


How Vishing works?
The attackers call the people with some prior information about them and act to be some official people from some organization, thereby asking for your other personal information. The little information that they have like your birth date etc is enough to break your trust and fool you, as the users feel that they are some officials only.

If the user gets caught in their web, then they asks them for their personal information like bank account number, PIN etc and may also provide you some fake webpage asking you to pay certain amount to keep your account running. The attackers call from some number that is not easy to detect even from the Caller ID facility.