Phishing - e-mails appear to be from a well-known company but can put you at risk. Although they can be difficult to spot, they generally ask you to click a link back to a spoof website and provide, update or confirm sensitive personal information. To bait you, they may allure to an urgent or threatening condition concerning your account. Even if you don't provide what they ask for, simply clicking the link could subject you to background installations of key logging software or viruses. Every business on the internet is a potential victim of phishing e-mail attacks, eroding the trust if their customers in the company's communications.

How will you know if it's a phishing scam?

Asking you for personal / sensitive information with a scenario or threat.

If the link on the e-mail is clicked, it will open up to an unsecure site.

Misspelled words in the site's URL address - domain highlighting may help you to verify the URL address.

Has generic greeting - it is being sent to numerous and unknown users.

Know more about various internet e-mail scams a

Pharming - is the term used when criminal hackers redirect internet traffic from one website to a different, identical-looking site in order to trick you into entering your username and password into the database on their fake site.

Cyber criminals try to acquire your personal information in order to access your bank account, steal your identity, or commit other kinds of fraud in your name, that is why banking and similar financial sites are often the targets of these attacks. Pharming might sound familiar to e-mail phishing scams, but pharming is more insidious, because you can be redirected to a false site without any participation or knowledge on your part.

3. SPAM - known as unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial e-mail, it is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages to numerous unknown users in bulk. However, some spam is part of an identity theft scam or another kind of fraud.

Top protect yourself against e-mail spam, use e-mail software with built-in spam filtering. For more information, see Help keep spam out of your in inbox. Identity theft spa, is often called a phishing scam.

4. Malwares - also known as malicious software. It is a software designed to break into a computer system without the user 's consent. Malwares are often present at malicious attacks such as scams and identity theft.

5. Virus - is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer. It is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, adware, and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability.

6. Spyware - is a type of malware that is installed on computers and collects information without you knowing it and sends the information to the author over the internet. It is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect by secretly installing itself without the knowledge of the user.

7. Worms - is a self-replicating computer program. It uses a computer network to send copies of itself to other computers without any user intervention. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. It can exploit security vulnerabilities to spread itself automatically to other computers through networks.

. Trojan - a program that appears harmless but hides malicious functions. It is a non-self-replicating malware to perform a desirable function for the user but instead facilitates unauthorized access to the user's computer system. The term is derived from the Trojan Horse story in Greek mythology.

To prevent malwares, virus and other internet security threats and attacks, you must ensure that your computer have an installed anti-virus / anti-spyware programs and keep them always updated.