E-mail Phishing, Don't Get Scammed!

So, you open your email and see nothing but spam every day and you think to yourself, who has time to do this all day?!

You're not alone, Email Spam affects all of us, here are some facts:

• 68 in 100 Email messages were spam in February of 2012.
• 1 in 298 email messages were identified as phishing in February of 2012.
• The US receives 68.8% of the worlds spam.  #1 is China
• The most popular email spam categories are adult/dating, pharmaceutical, watches/jewelry, and weight loss.
• Most popular brands for phishing are, Paypal, Facebook, TAM, Santander Bank, Master Card, Cielo, AOL, Posteitaliane, Bradesco & JP Morgan Chase.

So you're probably asking yourself, what is Phishing?. Phishing is a form of spam, it's a type of internet fraud that seeks to acquire a user's credentials by deception.  It includes theft or passwords, credit card numbers, bank account details and other confidential information.

Phishing messages usually take the form of fake notifications from banks, providers, e-pay systems and other organizations. The notification will try to encourage a recipient, for one reason or another, to urgently enter/update their personal data. Such excuses usually relate to loss of data, system breakdown, etc.

Phishing attacks are becoming more advanced in their exploitation of social engineering techniques. In most cases, fraudsters try to frighten a recipient by providing a seemingly important reason that the recipient should divulge their personal data. Such messages usually contain threats to block an account if a recipient does not fulfill the requirements therein. For instance, “if you do not provide your personal data by the end of the week, your account will be blocked”.

If you ever get an email that asks you for your personal information, do not click on any links or call any numbers from the email.  Call the company itself and ask them if it's a legitimate email.  A lot of people fall for this since these guys make the Phishing emails look exactly like it's coming from whoever they are pretending to be.

So, what can you do to avoid being scammed?

These people are really good at what they do, so below I will list a couple of obvious things to look for.

1. Does the "To" field include your email address? (If the answer is no, treat this email as if it's Spam)
2. Does the information from the message sound incredible? (If it does, try this.  Copy a sentence from the message and Google it to check its credibility.)
3. Are you being asked to "Sign a petition" by forwarding the message to all of your friends? (Do not fill this out, petitions are normally signed on websites, not through emails.)
4. Have you received an email with a shortened link in message? (Don't blindly click on a link in an email.  Expand the URL first using previews or plug-ins, Gmail does this by simply hovering your mouse over the link.)
5. Are you asked to follow the link in a message and update your account information? (make sure the name of the service resides in a Domain, not in a sub domain.  For example, mybankispnc.com.567.info.net is a sub domain.  a domain would be www.pncbank.com
6. Are you getting too much spam and phishing mail? (Use a smart email client like Outlook or EmailTray which ranks messages by importance and lets you focus on important emails while pushing Junk mail aside.

Spam / Phishing is a serious and a very real threat.  If you would like to know more about Phishing go to this website, www.phishtank.com they break down exactly what phishing is, you can verify Phishing email, you can report a phishing email etc.

I hope that this helps you in identifying phishing emails that come through your mailbox.  And hopefully help you in not getting scammed by these criminals!

If you have any questions you can email me at William@Techsupportman.com