Vishing is the term given to the practice of leveraging Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to trick people into providing personal and financial details over the phone for financial reward by pretending to represent real companies such as banks, which the fraudster then uses to achieve some financial gain. The term is a combination of "voice" and phishing. A "visher" is a person who perpetrates a vishing attack.

Vishing exploits the public's trust of landline telephone services. Traditional landline services end in a physical location that is known to the telephone company, and is associated with a bill payer. With the advent of VoIP, telephone services may now terminate in computers, which make illegal acts easier to achieve than with traditional "dumb" telephony endpoints.

A typical vishing attack could follow a sequence such as described below:

• The fraudster sets up an automatic dialler that uses a modem to call all phone numbers in a given region.
• When the phone is answered, an automated recording is played to alert the customer that his/her credit card has had illegal activity and the customer should call the recorded phone number immediately. The phone number could be a toll free number often with a caller identifier that makes it appear that they are calling from the financial company they are pretending to represent. Net phone technology makes it easy to fake the number someone is calling from.
• When the customer calls the number, it is answered by a computer generated voice that tells the customer they have reached 'account verification' and instructs the consumer to enter their 16-digit credit card number on the key pad.
• Once the customer enters their credit card number, the "visher" has all of the information necessary to place fraudulent charges on the consumer's card. Those responding are also asked for the security number found on the rear of the card.
• The call can then be used to obtain additional details such as security PIN, expiry date, date of birth, bank account number, etc.

• Legitimate banks already have some knowledge of your personal details. Be suspicious of any call that appears to be ignorant of basic personal details like first and last name (although it is unsafe to rely on this alone as a sign that the call is legitimate). If you receive such a call, report it to your bank.
• Do not call and leave any personal or account details on any telephone system that you are directed to by a telephone message or from a telephone number provided in a phone message, an email or an SMS especially if it is regarding possible security issues with your credit card or bank account. When a telephone number is given, you should first call the phone number on the back of your credit card or on your bank statement to verify if the number given is actually an office number of the bank.
• Make sure you call your bank or the company that is the subject of the call to check it is legitimate before disclosing any personal information.

Phishing is the term given to the criminal practice of sending random emails purporting to come from genuine companies such as banks and ecommerce organisations. These emails try to convince customers of those companies to disclose personal information on fake websites operated by criminals.

The emails often contain emotive messages and claim that it is necessary to "validate" or "update" customer account information. The emails contain instructions to click on a link within the email which takes the recipient of the email to the fake website. Here, all information entered is collected and may be used to perpetrate different criminal acts.

Your funds could be stolen and used to finance criminal activities such as human trafficking, drugs and prostitution and your identity cloned and used for fraudulent purposes.

Trojans are a type of computer virus and their name is derived from the term 'Trojan Horse' from Greek mythology. They can be downloaded and installed on a computer without the owner's knowledge.

Trojans are capable of performing sophisticated tasks; some variants can install a "keystroke logger", which will capture all keystrokes entered into a computer by a keyboard, others are designed to capture specific information entered at specific websites such as banks or ecommerce stores, either by keystroke logging or taking screen shots. As with phishing, the information is then sent to the criminals over the Internet, however this time directly by your computer.

Criminals typically send out random emails containing emotive or intriguing messages in an attempt to lure people to click on a hyperlink contained in the email and visit a malicious website. These websites may contain latent vulnerabilities on various web browsers that are exploited to download and install the specific Trojan. It is important to remember to be cautious if you receive unsolicited emails from unknown sources and never click on hyperlinks in emails to visit unknown websites.

At present, Trojans take advantage of vulnerabilities in web browsers. To prevent Trojan Horses from infecting your operating system and web browser, you should:

• Be cautious about all unsolicited email (especially those from unknown senders) and never click on hyperlinks from these emails to visit unknown websites. Some criminals use emails to trigger the download and installation of Trojans when your email programme uses HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to display the message and the images contained. It is always safer to open all your emails in 'plain text' format
• Install and keep updated anti-virus software and run regular scans (once a week as a minimum)
• Install and use a personal firewall (hardware or software based)
• Install the latest security updates, for your browser and operating system

We strongly advise that you ensure your operating system and web browser remain patched with the latest version or security updates as issued by the vendor. Many of the patches are designed to prevent criminals from exploiting vulnerabilities in current software versions. It may also be worth reviewing your current choice of browser to one less popular as many of the Trojans are created to exploit vulnerabilities in the most popular browsers.

In addition to targeted emails requesting bank account details, the criminals behind Trojan emails often use emotive or intriguing subjects such as ('Typhoon Warning' or 'Your ISP account is expiring) to lure people into clicking a hyperlink from the email to visit an unknown website. By employing a good anti-spam filter you should be able to significantly lessen the chances of receiving Trojan related emails.