A phishing site is one that mimics or masquerades some other popular website in order to deceive people into entering their personal or financial information. Usually cyber-criminals send the links to phishing site inside an e-mail message. For example, you might receive an spoofed e-mail message from your bank asking you to change the password followed by a phishing link to the bank’s online banking login page. This phishing link actually opens a different web page designed to look exactly like the bank site. When you enter your bank login credentials, they get captured by the cyber-criminals and then you are redirected to the genuine bank’s site.
This type of phishing can be preventing by getting in the habit of not clicking on any of these links inside the email messages without first verifying the authenticity of the email sender. We have previously posted about how you can check who actually sent you an email message. In addition, you can install an anti-virus product like avast antivirus that can scan the web pages in real time for malicious content.
If you are using the Chrome web browser, then it already has in-built protection from phishing and malicious web sites, but you can further enhance this protection using the Web Protector extension. This extension adds a toolbar icon in the Chrome browser. If you find a web site suspicious, then you can click on this icon to verify if that website is safe or not.
The Web Protector extension does not have any options to set and it works right out of the box. But you should not depend solely on this extension for phishing protection, instead you should couple it with other standard means of cyber-defense like a good anti-virus product and getting in the habit of keeping all your programs including the operating system up-to-date.
You can get the Web Protector extension for Chrome from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-protector-reliable-ph/kfecnpmgnlnbmipaogfhoacoioifjgko.