It’s as easy for hackers to phish out your personal data as it is to sit in a canoe on a still pond, cast the bait and wait for the fish to bite.

So many people fail to learn about phishing scams, a favorite and extremely prevalent scam among cybercriminals.

A type of phishing scam is to lure the user onto a malicious website. ZeuS (Zbot) is such an example, planted on websites; visit that site and it will download a virus to your device that will steal your online banking information, then forward it to a remote server, where the thief will obtain it. Very clever.

But that ingenuity is contingent on someone being gullible enough to open a phishing e-mail, and then taking that gullibility one step further by clicking on the link to the malicious site.

10 Phishing Alerts

• An unfamiliar e-mail or sender. If it’s earth-shaking news, you’ll probably be notified in person or via a voice phone call.
• An e-mail that requests personal information, particularly financial. If the message contains the name and logo of the business’s bank, phone the bank and inquire about the e-mail.
• An e-mail requesting credit card information, a password, username, etc.
• A subject line that’s of an urgent nature, particularly if it concludes with an exclamation point.

Additional Tips

• Keep the computer browser up-to-date.
• If a form inside an e-mail requests personal information, enter “delete” to chuck the e-mail.
• The most up-to-date versions of Chrome, IE and Firefox offer optional anti-phishing protection.
• Check out special toolbars that can be installed in a web browser to help guard the user from malicious sites; this toolbar provides fast alerts when it detects a fraudulent site.