6. Security: anti-phishing

Phishing is a kind of con trick. It is designed to fool you into unknowingly revealing your login details. It normally appears in the form of an email, but there are also scams that involve letters through the post.

It works something like this: You receive a very authentic looking email from a bank or building society claiming that there is problem with your account ( intended to cause panic) and that you must, must do something about it or your account will be frozen (call to action). The email contains a convenient URL link for you to click and log in (the trap).

The link actually takes you to a fake login page. It will look exactly like the real thing, sometimes even down to the little padlock in the browser status bar indicating a secure site.

But this is NOT the real site. You foolishly enter your login details and the deed is done.

This trick is also used to access online game accounts, so beware.

Anti-phishing

The simplest thing to do is to never, ever click on a link provided by email. Type the home page of the organisation yourself if you think it is real, and go from there.

There are also browser add-ins that checks for fake web sites, it does this in a number of ways, one of which is to check the IP address of the page being viewed against the real IP address of the organisation. If they do not match, then a warning is given.