by AARON PRATHER

Phishing is a one of the fastest-growing cybercrimes and costs consumers millions of dollars each year. Pronounced “fishing”, is named from spammers using fraudulent email messages to “fish” for information in an attempt to get their recipients to divulging personal data like credit card numbers, bank account numbers, social security numbers, and passwords. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging, and often directs users to give details at a particular website. It is one of the biggest threats on the internet and users need to be made more aware of what it is and what it can do. Phishing is so prevalent on the internet that if you receive an email supposedly from your bank, it’s likely to be either a criminal attempt to get your login details or a real email warning you to be careful of this scam.

The rapidly growing class of identity theft scams on the internet has caused both short-term and long-term economic damage, faced by millions of people every day. First appearing more than ten years ago, phishing has grown to become the international electronic crime of choice for both amateurs and professionals alike. This scam typically works like this: a scammer sends you an email message making it seem like it is an official message from a company you may have financial or other interests with, like your bank, PayPal, or eBay, and ask for your personal information such as social security number, account number or password. These emails are also becoming more personalized, making them more believable to their victims and has become such a problem on AOL that they added a message on their instant messenger stating: “no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information”. These types of attacks have outnumbered e-mails infected with viruses and trojans. Most methods of phishing use some form of deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to a legitimate organization, while in fact it sends you to a bogus website. If you get a suspicious email contains a URL link, don’t click on it, roll your mouse over the link and see if it matches what appears in the email. Learn to recognize spoof emails by checking web addresses and security indicators, such as a locked padlock on the browser frame. As a general rule, never click on emails coming from unknown sources. Spam filters can help by reducing the number of phishing emails that users receive, however spammers often use poor spelling, bad grammar, missing words and logic gaps to get around the filters.

Phishing is the fastest growing crime which everyone on the internet is susceptible to, an old con game taking advantage of new technology. It is so prevalent because it is such a low-cost and low-effort activity. Phishing attacks are likely to grow more sophisticated and our defenses against them must continue to improve to combat them.
About the Author AARON H PRATHER owns and operates http://www.whatisphishing101.com providing infomation regarding phishing attacks and identity theft scams.What Is Phishing

[tags]phishing, what is phishing, phishing 101, cybercrime, spam filter, scams, identity theft[/tags]

by Dominic Dat

The cat is out of the bag as more and more people are becoming aware of the profit making potential in the expired domain name market. The fact is that there are a lot of viable domain names that have expired and are available to be bought up and claimed as your own.

You may be asking yourself how an active domain that is generating business can be simply abandoned by someone but the fact is that it happens every day for any number of reasons. People change courses in their lives and simply let things go all the time, which can lead to their domain names becoming abandoned.

There are also those people that try to get rich quick who create, promote and discard domains on a regular basis. Due to the fact that many of these domains have been heavily promoted prior to being abandoned, many times they have regular traffic that which can prove lucrative if you were to place a website on that domain, or alternatively the traffic can be redirected to other websites. You may not get rich quick, but you can achieve a steady income. Overtime you could build up an impressive portfolio of domains that provide a very large income.

For affiliate marketers, these expired domain names can be a gold mine for generating traffic to their websites. Affiliate marketing is a great way for someone who has the gift of an entrepreneurial spirit to break into the internet business world. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have the hassle of filling orders or acquiring inventory. An affiliate marketing website only needs to attracts visitors and then direct them to other websites that are selling the actual product. After a sale is made, the owner of the originating website is paid a percentage of the sale. So you can see how valuable expired domains can be in providing the traffic for affiliate marketers.

It is important to point out that there are many expired domains that were never promoted, and won’t receive any visitors. It can be a hard, time consuming challenge to find an expired domain that will provide you with visitors – you need a list of domains, then you need to find out when the domains will expire (or maybe they have expired already), then discover how good the domain may be. To discover how valuable the domain might be to you, you need to discover such things as the topic of the original website on the domain, how many links point at the domain, how search engines rank the domain, etc.

A website that provides all this data, such as DomDat.com , could prove a valuable asset in your search for expired domains.

Some corporations have been making money for years by having a large number of domains that direct visitors to their business website. Some of these companies specialize in buying expiring domains which can then result in thousands of visitors each and every day to their websites. If they can do it, why not you?
About the Author Worked with expired domains for the last few years, and now working with http://www.domdat.com

[tags]domains, expired domains, buy domains, affiliate marketers, traffic, generating traffic, web hosting[/tags]