Phishing attacks

Every once in a while your email spam filter lets an email slip by it and make it into the mail box that could be proclaiming anything from a bank asking its customer to “verify an account” to the Spanish lottery commission congratulating you on “winning the lottery”.

This kind of attack aims to pull a slight of hand trick on web users and fooling them into providing their private information to the attacker. In a phishing attack, the aim is to bait the user into believing that the email and website they are getting redirected to are legitimate. The scheme collapses once the user doesn’t take the bait.

The aim of this post is to discuss some of the best precautions you can take to protect yourself.

Tip 1 Be skeptical

Any legitimate organization would not ask for your user name, password or credit card information over email. Unless you are 100% sure that the email is legitimate, you should just ignore it. But if you can’t help but think the email might be legit, you should never trust the links sent to you by email. Instead, browse to the relevant website by typing the company or bank’s URL address by yourself. If there is anything that the company wants to inform its users with, then it will have it announced on their website.

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