Wikipedia defines Phishing as a process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

This attempt to acquire info about your bank account is for the purpose of getting into the account and then transferring money to another account, hence robbing you of your hard earned money with a few mouse clicks.

Lately a lot of people having accounts in ICICI and HDFC have reported of having someone steal their money directly from their account and by the time they find out… it’s too late!

HDFC bank recently implemented a 2 Tier security system where by people using net banking with TPT (Third Party Transfer) facility will have the option to add additional security to their account login so that the fraud can be totally avoided. They have done a 2 step process where first you get an image and a text associated with the image, right after you type in your user id and hit enter, if the image and text is the same as you had selected while adding the security measures then you would know that the website you are logging onto is authentic HDFC banks net banking website. This step is to make sure when you click a link from any email to bank online that you have not been redirected to any fraud website. The second step is to answer in random any of the 5 questions you had previously answered while adding the security to your account (this is only while using the TPT option). Even if someone gets access to your account they will not be able to transfer money to another account without knowing the answer to all the five questions.

I recommend that everyone who is using the net banking facilities check with their banks if they have some kind of security set up like HDFC does. Like everyone says, prevention is better than cure… you should avoid banking online from cyber cafes and while on your own PC or Laptop make sure you have adequate firewall software installed and that your anti-virus and anti-spamware software’s are up to date. Do not download and install software on random as most of the free software’s when installed, install a bunch of other software’s which monitor you activity online and even send the report back to the person who created it thus increasing the chances of banking frauds.

Scammers have gotten smarter over the years and have embraced new technology, its high time we do the same to protect ourselves.