With regards to personal computing, phishing is an attempt to obtain private information from end users by presenting themselves as legitimate, often used and trusted websites.  The ultimate goal is to obtain personal information about you that may be tied to identity theft activities. 

Contact is commonly done by e-mail and instant messaging programs.  The message may ask you for your bank account information, passwords and may direct you to a specific website that has been designed to look like an actual, legitimate site. Some examples of legitimate websites are Youtube, Facebook, My Space, eBay, Yahoo, etc. 

Sources:  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Webopedia, online encyclopedia

-----Original Message-----

From: EDU HELP TEAM <helpteam4edu@live.com>

Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2008 2:47 PM

To: webmaster@edu.edu <webmaster@edu.edu>

Subject: YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT UPGRADE!!!

Thank you for choosing .EDU!!!

This is a mail from .EDU billing department.We write to bring to your notice that we will be carrying out some temporary maintenance on our service due to congestion in all EDU email accounts and we are afraid that during this process email accounts of our customers will be deactivated; but just to avoid your email account from been deactivated and to enable your records remain in our database we advise you provide us with the below informations or your email account will be suspended within 48 hours for security reasons.

Email address:...........................

Password:............................

Date of Birth:.......................

Country Or Territory:.....................

Phone number:..........................

After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue to work as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request.Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to upgrade his or her account before two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.Kindly send the required informations back to us.We sincerely apologise for any inconviniences this might have caused you.Thank you for your co-operation.And thanks again for choosing .EDU.

Sincerely,

Customer Care

EDU