Can you see the difference between 1cbc.com.cn and icbc.com.cn, bank-off-china.com and bank-of-china.com on the screen? If not, be careful, you may be deceived and lose money once you input your bank account passwords, www.china.com.cn/info reported on January 18.

This is phishing, a criminal activity whereby a thief tries to imitate the urls, pages and contents of real websites to insert dangerous HTML code with the aim of stealing private information such as the bank account numbers, or passwords from the users.

Anti-Phishing Alliance of China (APAC), a non-governmental organization, recently stated that most of the complaints they received involved www.taobao.com, CCTV and www.qq.com. It warned that as the promotion of various e-commerce websites increases ahead of the Spring Festival, online purchasing will flourish, and more phishing cases will occur.

In China, there are two main types of phishing websites: one is the intimation of the CCTV website, informing users that they have won a prize and luring them to input their personal information; the other is the intimation of the online payment page of Taobao, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. When receiving a report about a suspected phishing website, APAC will inform technical support agencies to analyze the website. Once the website is identified as a phishing website, its domain name resolution will be suspended within two hours.

According to China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Center, losses caused by phishing websites have currently hit 7.6 billion yuan (US$1.11 billion). Xinhua News Agency reported that the information contained in about 30,000 e-mail boxes registered under Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and American on Line has been stolen after being hacked by phishing websites.

To combat illegal websites, many departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Public Security, have set up supervision institutions.

Imitating the domain names of real websites is a popular method for phishing websites. Therefore, using technological means to manage domain names is an effective way to deal with these illegal websites. Enterprises should adopt Internet security techniques, and strengthen awareness among employees, network safety experts said. They also suggest netizens take precautions against phishing websites, never leave personal information on the Internet, not transfer private information through software like QQ、MSN、e-mail, and not give credence to false rumors, such as those about prizes, which are spread on the Internet.

Statistics from APAC show that up to the end of November 2009, the organization had received more than 12,000 reports about suspected phishing websites, among which 10,568 domain names resolutions had been suspended.