One fine morning you may find an email like this in your mailbox:

Subject: Your ads have been suspended.

Dear Advertiser,
————–
We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.
—————–
Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.
——————————–
We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.
Thank you for advertising with Google AdWords.

If you happen to be an AdWords advertiser this can send a chill down your spine. Relax, you have nothing to worry.

This is a recent phishing attempt to get your AdWords login and password. The link in the email points to a Chinese site, a sub-domain of groupsd.cn ( www.adwords.google.com.groupsd.cn ).

Phishing is the fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card details etc., by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication (like email). Phishing is typically carried out by email and it often directs users to enter details at a website which looks very similar, if not exactly identical, to the orignal website it is masquerading.

How can you identify phishing scams?

Email clients like Thunderbird detects many phishing attempts and warns you with a clear message:

Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam.

However you too can detect such scams easily. Mouse-over the links in the email and you will find that the actual url of the email is displayed in the status bar below. If you see the target url (in the status bar) is different from the url displayed in the email then you are most likely dealing with a phishing scam.

In general never click on url's in email. You should go to the actual website by either typing in the URL or using your pre-existing bookmark. This is the single biggest tip I can give you to protect your self from phishing scams.