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Phishing
is the act of tricking someone into giving them confidential information or tricking them into doing something that they normally wouldn’t do or shouldn’t do. For example: sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.
The term phishing is a contraction of password and fishing. The fraudster is fishing for sensitive information that can be used to defraud its victim.
Especially sites such as PayPal (owned by eBay) have a large amount of phishing attacks, due to its widespread use. There are some countermeasures to phishing that you should be aware of: For one thing; enter the addresse yourself, don't click links from an email. This avoid the problem where the email addresse written in the email isn't the same as you get directed to, as phishers tend to masquerade the actual address.
There has been an increasing trend for phising attacks against different banks worldwide. The phisher might send an email, claiming to be from your bank, saying "we had a break-in and some passwords got on the loose, please log in and change your password". Then provide a link to their website,looking exactly like the one you expect from your bank. Then when you log in, they simply store the information, tell you you entered it wrongly and redirect you to the actual banking site.
They now have all your details, watch out for this
Secure sites
Every site dealing with personal information should use a method named Secure Socket Layers (SSL for short). This is usually represented with the address for the site being https:// and a lock-icon being shown in your browser window. In Mozilla Firefox, this icon look like:
This usually implies two things. First of all all the communcation between you and the server is encrypted, meaning that nobody can read the information on the way to its destination. Furthermore it imply that the website's identity has been verified by a Central Authority. Look for such signs and embrace them.
Plugins
Once in a while, especially if running Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer you will be asked to install third party applications. Please, do not install any plugin you're not expecting, it will more than otherwise install spyware and trojan horses. The general rule is pressing no, except otherwise expected and wanted.