A flood of phishing sites and how to avoid them

During a three-month study of its global malware database, Panda Security found on average 57,000 new Web sites created each week with the aim of exploiting a brand name in order to steal information that can be used to drain peoples' bank accounts.

While many people are duped by the fake e-mail messages and attachments, there are typically some obvious clues that the message is not legitimate. Usually there are egregious misspellings, poor grammar, and bad punctuation.