What is the difference between spam and phishing?
The main difference between spam and phishing is that spam is an unwanted and unnecessary message that is sent over the WWW whereas phasing is an attempt by attackers to obtain users’ credentials for activities. malicious by appearing as trustworthy entities.
World Wide Web (WWW) connects millions and millions of users. They can access information in a few seconds by connecting to this massive network. However, certain security threats have emerged with the rapid development of technology. Spam refers to an unsolicited message while phishing is the process of appearing as legal organizations to obtain sensitive details from users.
Key Areas Covered
1. What is Spam
– Definition, Functionality
2. What is Phishing
– Definition, Functionality
3. What is the relationship between spam and phishing?
– Association scheme
4. What is the difference between spam and phishing?
– Comparison of key difference
what is spam What is the difference between spam and phishing?
Spam is an unnecessary message sent through the WWW. The most common type of spam is junk email. Most spam messages consist of links to phishing websites or websites that harbor malware. Additionally, they can include malware as scripts or other types of executable attachments. Also, they take up a large amount of network bandwidth.
Spammers collect email addresses from websites, customer lists, chat rooms, and newsgroups. Sometimes they sell the collected email addresses to other spammers. Most online services are instituting policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers. Even though many countries pass laws to ban spam, they are increasing rapidly as spammers are hard to catch.
what is phishing What is the difference between spam and phishing?
Phishing refers to a threat where unauthorized persons attempt to obtain sensitive information such as user name, password, and credit card information from users. These parties are distinguished as trusted parties to obtain information from users.
Users can make online transactions through WWW easily and quickly. However, online business transactions are safe as long as the user communicates with trustworthy organizations. Attackers can trick users by appearing as trusted entities. Therefore, users will enter their sensitive information such as PIN numbers, passwords, and account numbers assuming they are contacting the correct organizations.
For example, the user may receive an email from their bank with a link to click. So the user clicks on that link and is taken to a separate page that asks them to enter their account number, password, etc. Also, attackers can obtain user details. Even though the user assumed the email is from the bank, it is from an attacker or an unauthorized party. The attacker uses the same logos, fonts, etc. of the company than the original organization to mislead users.
There are few steps to prevent phishing. If an email leads to a website, you need to verify the web address. Additionally, you can install anti-phishing software to check online accounts and credit reports on a regular basis.
Relationship
- Most spam messages contain links that lead to phishing websites.
Difference
Definition What is the difference between spam and phishing?
Spam refers to unsolicited and unwanted messages in bulk. In contrast, phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain a user’s sensitive information for malicious reasons by disguising itself as a trusted entity in electronic communication. These definitions give us an idea of the difference between spam and phishing.
Purpose
Thus, the main difference between spam and phishing is that spam is used for advertising, phishing, and malware propagation while phishing is used to obtain sensitive information from users.
functionality What is the difference between spam and phishing?
Additionally, spammers collect email addresses from websites, customer lists, chat rooms, and newsgroups to send out spam. They also sell the addresses to other spammers. In phishing, attackers send a genuine-looking email to the user to trick them into entering their details. Therefore, this is also an important difference between spam and phishing.
Prevention
User can use alternative email address, should not click links in unknown emails, review privacy terms before registering on websites, should not open attachments in unknown emails to avoid spam. User can install anti-phishing software to prevent phishing.
conclusion
In short, spam can lead to bigger security threats like phishing. The difference between spam and phishing is that spam is an unwanted and unnecessary message sent over the WWW, while phasing is an attempt by attackers to obtain user credentials for malicious activity by appearing as trustworthy entities.