Nov 13, 2006 09:35 AM
2961 Views
(Updated Nov 16, 2006 02:05 PM)
Today everyone wants to be online… some things that we could easily do few years back by traditional ways, today, seems impossible without doing it online.
Just think of the following:
how many of us send a greeting card to our loved ones? How many of us use snail mail to send quotations for business expansions? how many of us send couriers for official communications?
All this was a part and parcel of our life few years back, today, suddenly have become a thing of past. We even do shopping, banking transactions, and what not, online. Net has totally revolutionized our lives. But, are we really online in getting online? That’s the question of top most importance.
What I mean by this is that are we going on upgrading ourselves with the darker side of this necessity?
Along with all the benefits, we continuously encounter much news like frauds, phishing, spoofing, spying and so on. If we want to make our lives comfortable on the net, we should be aware of all these jargons..
I would like to quote a recent example with my friend.
My friend owns a private company in manufacturing and marketing of some product. They got some inquiries from prospective buyers. After all quotations were sent, and negotiations finalized, and when came the time of closing the deal, the buyers backed out without any communication or what so ever of any kind. Now, this is not the trend in international markets. (The buyer posed as a buyer from some other country wanting the products of my friends’s company located in India).
After this whole episod, my friend got suspicious and we tried to track the location from where we received the inquire. It turned out that the inquiry was from neighbouring plant, and that their competitor was posing as prospective buyer. My friend ended up in giving all crucial business information to the competitor..(((
WHAT a SHOCK it was to learn that…
What can you call this? Phishing? Though everything was OK, someone got you cheated into this…
But then, what could have been done, or what should be done in future to avoid this.
The identity of people on net is totally hidden and so, that can be the biggest threat you can assume. But, if you go to the background of it, it is not really so. Every mail has headers, commonly known as internet headers. This gives all details of the person sending that mail, though it can be a bit tough for a novice to decode the same.
Even though, you can follow the following in case you suspect some suspicious mail:
check the internet header of the mail check the ip address of the sender. send the address and mailing details to the senders service provider.
But, never never disclose your passwords, user ids , credit card details over the net. Even there have been incidences where we receive a mail claiming to be from our bank, but in reality its phishing and they just want our user ids and passwords. You can do a similar scanning for such mails and get a official complaint registered against the same..
So, I say, YOU SHOULD REALLY BE ONLINE IF YOU WANT TO GO ONLINE…..
