Hello Steemians,

After a minor hiccup of Steem blockchain, phishers are making their way out and catching as much account as they can! Problem with them is that they need a plethora of steem/sbd tokens so they can fulfill their cheap intentions. Last day, they hacked an account of a steemit user having a reputation score of 70+ and the way they caught her is truly shameful. Phishers are looking for a high reputation steemit account as the more reputation score you have the more people on steemit will trust you or sometimes go blindly with you. There is no problem in trusting someone, but the tragedy happens when these phishers come in the game. Phishers first gain control of a high reputation score by spoofing them with a fake steemit login page and empty-up their wallet. They go one more step ahead and starts commenting on other high reps steemit user with an image link. Once you click on such links you will be redirected to another fake page which will be connected to phisher's database, and within seconds of entering your key they will change your master key and take control of your account.

Source: Pandroid.co

Identify the phishing links!

Generating a fake login page of any website is really easy and one can generate hundreds of spoof/fake page within a minute! What you think, how they create an exact fake login page? Do they require all that CSS/Bootstrap and high coding skills? Well, the answer is no!
Even a 10-year-old kid can do this, its that easy! There is no need for high-level skills or vision for creating a fake login page. Ever heard of Kali Linux?
WebExploit is such a tool where you have to just drop the link of the website and it will create a fake page on its own. You have to hit the enter button and you are all geared up to spoof anyone. Even if you have the knowledge, please don't do this, you may don't even know how much trouble you are creating for others!
Even with an exact fake login page, you can still get your self in a safe zone of the internet. The problem with faking login page is "Link". You can copy a page but you can't copy a domain!
Still, there is a loophole in this, phishers use link shortening tool to completely spoof someone. Never click on such links, even though if it is from someone whom you know. As their account may have been hijacked and phishers might be trying to catch you in their strings!

Have at least two browsers!

The best possible way to get your self-safe from such links is to use two browsers. I prefer two browsers technique as they completely isolate the probability of getting your account hacked.

"Even if you are on the desktop, use two browsers, one for the external links and other one for your steemit or other accounts. For say, I prefer chrome to login in the steemit account or some other sort of steemit or professional works. And you can choose any other browser of your choice, for say, Firefox and set Firefox as default for any incoming links either from discord or via any other steem social community."

Ignore all the low reps account and their comments. You can still reveal the comment to see if there is anything that anyone wants to share with you or otherwise leave it as it is, no need of inspecting such elements unless and until you know the risk associated with such actions.
Low reps steemit user do deserve a second chance but in terms of phishing or any malware attacks, a big NO!

Sniffers!

Source : Comodo.com

Yes, there are sniffers who are active and continuously sniffing memos for any kind of key matching phrases. Hive account@firedream has found many sniffers and has even deployed a bot for the same work to neutralize such cheats.
Keep your clipboards clean after logging in the steemit. As many times user forgets to do so and end up pasting their keys in discord community or in memos while bidding.
Once cheaters get control of your account they will simply clean your wallet balance and even defame you either by abusing other people on steemit or by spamming every comment or chat section with their phishing links!
In the end, security of your account is in your hand, not every time you will be lucky! Be careful! Hive account@surfermarly was such an account which was hijacked via phishing link. Thanks to Hive account@sircork and Hive account@good-karma for helping her out. This also shows that we stand together against any false things!