Chan's Personal Blog

Every now and again, I hear stories of bloggers making money off their websites. How much money are we talking about? Sometimes it's enough money to cover the annual costs of running a website, ie paying for the domain name and web hosting. I've heard from others that they make enough to buy a coffee a day. Other times, I hear about people that blog for a living, which means they're making enough money to quit their day jobs. Anyways, the concept of making some extra cash from blogging has peaked my interest, and I'm trying it out now as an experiment.

In this article, I will discuss a few business models that bloggers have employed to make some money. The first model involves advertisements on a blog. The second model involves readers tipping bloggers; this model is a bit more exotic, but it seems to be working in places like South Korea.

Anyone who isn't a computer expert, and does their banking online should pay attention to today's article. Today's talk is about phishing. What the heck is phishing you ask? The Wikipedia defines phishing as, "a form of social engineering, characterised by attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently official electronic communication, such as an email or an instant message. The term phishing arises from the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to 'fish' for users' financial information and passwords."

In plain English, phishers are trying to steal your passwords and such by tricking you into giving them that information via a fake website or e-mail.

The reason I'm talking about phishing today is because I got an e-mail from a phisher today. Here's what it looked like:


My immediate reaction was, I don't have a TD Bank account, so this must be a fake, but boy does it look real. It'd be really bad if someone got fooled by this thing. Read on to learn how to spot phish bait.