What is Phishing Email and How to Avoid it?

Phishing is a popular form of cybercrime due to its effectiveness. Cybercriminals have successfully used emails, text messages, and direct messages on social media or in video games to obtain personal information.The best defense is awareness and knowing what to look for.

Here are some ways to recognize a phishing email:

• Urgent call to action or threats – Be suspicious of emails that claim you must click, call, or open an attachment immediately. Often, they’ll assert that you need to act now to claim a reward or avoid a penalty. Creating a false sense of urgency is a common trick in phishing attacks and scams. They do this to prevent you from thinking it through or consulting with a trusted advisor who might warn you.

  Tip: Whenever you see a message calling for immediate action, take a moment, pause, and look carefully at the message. Are you sure it’s real? Slow down and be safe.

   

• First-time or infrequent senders – While it’s not unusual to receive an email from someone for the first time, especially if they are outside your organization, this can be a sign of phishing. When you get an email from somebody you don’t recognize, or that Outlook identifies as a new sender, take a moment to examine it extra carefully before you proceed.

   

• Spelling and bad grammar – Professional companies and organizations usually have an editorial staff to ensure customers get high-quality, professional content. If an email message has obvious spelling or grammatical errors, it might be a scam. These errors are sometimes the result of awkward translation from a foreign language, and sometimes they’re deliberate in an attempt to evade filters that try to block these attacks.

   

• Generic greetings – An organization that works with you should know your name and these days it’s easy to personalize an email. If the email starts with a generic “Dear sir or madam” that’s a warning sign that it might not be your bank or shopping site.

   

• Mismatched email domains – If the email claims to be from a reputable company, like Microsoft or your bank, but the email is being sent from another email domain like Gmail.com, or microsoftsupport.ru it’s probably a scam. Also, be watchful for very subtle misspellings of the legitimate domain name. Like micros0ft.com where the second “o” has been replaced by a 0, or rnicrosoft.com, where the “m” has been replaced by an “r” and an “n”. These are common tricks of scammers. 

   

• Suspicious links or unexpected attachments – If you suspect that an email message is a scam, don’t open any links or attachments. Instead, hover your mouse over the link (without clicking) to see if the address matches the link that was typed in the message. For example, resting the mouse over a link might reveal a web address that looks nothing like the company’s legitimate web address.