Hello Everyone.
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Welcome to my post, I really want to use this medium to thank our able teacher @fredquantum, no doubt your time and devotion to making sure that the kids learn all they need to know about Cryptocurrency is not a waste as impacts are been made in our lives.
People falling victim to scams are no longer new stories, many became victims of scam because of greed and wanting to reap where they did not sow, a user promising to give you 100 steem and you believe and clicked on the link sent, that's you been greedy. There are many methods scammers use to defraud people of their assets and phishing attack is one of them.
Phishing attack is one of the worst way to loose your asset, you don't just loose your asset but also the account where the asset were been stored as the scammer gains access to both account and asset.
Phishing attacks are said to be cybersecurity attacks where scammers create a replica of a trusted firm and try to lure victims into believing they are original and can be trusted. Phishing attacks have evolved and is now in the Cryptocurrency ecosystem where the scammer or group of scammers clone an exchange site, I was inexperienced and I fell victim of a cloned site sometime ago and I lost some assets to the scammers alongside the wallet.
The scammer tricks the rightful owner of an asset into installing malicious files by just clicking on a malicious link, those malicious files that were installed gives the scammer full access to the owners device and asset.
Clone Phishing Attack: A scammer creates a duplicate of a legit site or firm, it's quite hard to detect that the site is cloned as everything looks exactly the same. The scammer takes time in editing his/her cloned site making sure his victim is convinced, it takes experience and a lot of combing before one can detect that the sight is cloned and not original.
If a user is not careful and clicks on the link, they might be asked to put in their details and by so doing they give the scammer access to their assets.
Reward Phishing Attack: This is common on the steemit blockchain and I almost fell victim if not for guidance from people who introduced me, a newbie earning 100 steem for doing nothing sounded good to me.
This type of phishing attack has to do with the scammer promising a user false rewards by carrying out few task that requires the user to click on a malicious link, like the one I clicked on sometime ago was asking me to input my active and vote them as a witness, if I had done that then I would have lost all my small earnings.
Just like we all know dust particles are tiny, therefore dusting attack has to do with the scammer sending small amount of crypto coin/token to a user in order to get details of the users wallet, once this information is gotten the scammer launches the attack on the wallet defrauding the user of his asset.
How can one Avoid being a victim of the two attacks discussed?
There are many ways one can avoid been defrauded if his assets, and all includes the following:
- Avoid clicking links from users you do not trust or from users you have nothing to do with.
- Don't chase rewards you did not work for.
- If you must click on a link then cross check and ensure it is not a cloned site.
- Do not give out your private key/active keys to sites outside the Steemit platform.
In conclusion, falling victim of scams can be avoided if users double check and confirm that the links received are original and not cloned. Thanks to our teacher once again.
Thanks for reading my post.