Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI and the Trump-era special counsel, famously refused to bank online after a close call with a fake-email scam in 2009.
So what had the man who used to be the head of the nation’s most respected law-enforcement organization fearing for his financial life? In a word, phishing — a term coined by internet con men to describe the process of “baiting” consumers with fake email, text, social-media, instant or even voice messages that entice them to provide their private information, just as an angler might lure a fish with a shiny spinner bait.
The FBI once called phishing the “hottest and most troubling new scam on the internet.”
While it’s no longer new, phishing is still the most reliable way for crooks and spies to get secret information and break into computer networks and online accounts. Understanding what phishing is and how to protect yourself from it is just as important as ever.
What phishing scams want
So what is phishing, exactly? Phishing is a confidence trick. Information-security experts will call it “social engineering,” but it’s a con job that tricks people into handing over sensitive personal information, often (but not only) the online credentials that consumers use to identify themselves in the online marketplace.
Some good examples of those valuable credentials are the usernames, email addresses and passwords that are used to log into sites that store a customer’s credit-card or bank-account details for future…
