How Online Criminals Steal Your Financial Information

Online predators across the world are using phishing or fake emails to millions of internet users to get their user ids and passwords of the financial institution's websites and prompt the users to enter their user ids and passwords.

They prompt you to enter the information by telling you that your account has been locked, or there is an error in your account, or that an unauthorized activity has been notice in your account. Then they prompt you to enter user id and password to check the account details. At same time they also prompt the users to change their passwords. The users are cheated into entering the details at a fraudulent site without realizing that the information provided by them may make them the victims of phishing scams or fraud.

Online predators collect the financial information of the people in this manner and use it to steal money from accounts, make financial transactions from your accounts, or even to withdraw cash from your accounts. At that time, hacker also creates identical accounts with the information that you feed in the fraudulent sites and they become the owners of your bank accounts or credit cards. The hacker may also indulge in identity theft using the information provided by you and create scams that portray you as the main mastermind.

To protection against such fraudulent activities, you must collect all the information about anti-phishing measures and take necessary actions. To ensure phishing protection, you must never click a link that is provided in the email. This is the foremost and most important rule that every user must be aware of and follow it religiously.

The very first way is to check for email address of the sender. If the email is fake, the email address will appear as (mailto:hacker@hackermail.net).

hacker@hackermail.net, even if the subject line of the line of the email mentions the name of some financial institution. Another way to detect the fraudulent email is to check for the website address of the link provided. In case of a fraud, the website address would be different from what is mentioned in the link provided. To check for this, you must manually enter the link name in the browser tab or search for the name in one of the search engines. Finally, if you happen to click the link inside the email, the address that appears on the browser will be different than given in the link.

 

• Premal H Patel

Why the modern world is bad for your brain?

Our brains are busier than ever before. Thirty years ago our travel agents made our airlines and rail reservations, sales people help us find what we are looking for in shops, and professional typist or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texture, SMS, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flash light. We use then all the time, part of a 21^st century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we are walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. We think we are doing several things at once which is multitasking, this is powerful and diabolical illusion.
Multitasking technology is good to certain limit. But, not good for overwhelming. It is badly effect to our brain. Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight or flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching external stimulation. Means attention can be easily hijacked by something new. The proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus aimed competing activities is clear, the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS or texture, and each of these things tweaks the novelty, seeking, reward-seeking centers of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids means no wonder its feels so good! All to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty calorie brain candy instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focus effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar coated tasks.
Multitasking is detrimental to cognitive performance. Means where you are trying to concentrate on a task and email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. Multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch tv at the same time, for example, the information from their school work goes into the striatum, a region specialized for strong new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organized and categorized in a very of ways, making it easier to retrieve. People can't do multitasking very well, and when they say the can, they are deluding themselves. And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.
There are the metabolic costs that asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn oxygenated glucose. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn it so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even short time. We have literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated tasks switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behavior. By contrast, staying on a task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the stratum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's heed for glucose which create uncertainty.
This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorization system, causes stress and leads to decision overload. Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex.
Make no mistake: email, Facebook, What's up and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction which break down our brain's metabolic system.
Guys, I briefed out this article from the recently release newspaper The UpBeat Times.
Kindly forward to all.

 

 

• Premal Patel