How to recognise a phishing Email & Messages?

Phishing is one of the most longstanding and dangerous methods of cyber crime. Despite what people think they know about phishing, they consistently fall victim. Scammers use email or text messages to trick you into giving them your personal information. They may try to steal your passwords, account numbers, or Social Security numbers. If they get that information, they could gain access to your email, bank, or other accounts.

1. The message creates a sense of urgency

Scammers know that most of us procrastinate. We receive an email giving us important news, and we decide we’ll deal with it later.

But the longer you think about something, the more likely you are to notice things that don’t seem right.

Maybe you realise that the organisation doesn’t contact you by that email address, or you speak to a colleague and learn that they didn’t send you a document.

Even if you don’t get that ‘a-ha’ moment, coming back to the message with a fresh set of eyes might help reveal its true nature.

That’s why so many scams request that you act now or else it will be too late. This has been evident in every example we’ve used so far.

PayPal, Windows and Netflix all provide services that are regularly used, and any problems with those accounts could cause immediate inconveniences.

2. The message is sent from a public email domain

No legitimate organisation will contact you from an address that ends ‘@gmail.com’. Not even Google. With the exception of independent workers, every organisation will have its own email domain and company accounts. For example, emails from Google will read ‘@google.com’. If the domain name (the bit after the @ symbol) matches the apparent sender of the email, the message is probably legitimate. The best way to check an organisation’s domain name is to type the company’s name into a search engine. This makes detecting phishing seem easy, but cyber criminals have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to deceive you.

3. The email is poorly written

You can often tell if an email is a scam if it contains unusual phrases and grammatical errors. Many people will tell you that such errors are part of a ‘filtering system’ in which cyber criminals target only the most gullible people. The theory is that, if someone ignores clues about the way the message is written, they’re less likely to pick up clues during the scammer’s endgame. However, this really only applies to outlandish schemes like the oft-mocked Nigerian prince scam, which you really do have to be incredibly naive to fall victim to. That, and scams like it, are manually operated: once someone takes to the bait, the scammer has to reply. As such, it benefits the crooks to make sure the pool of respondents contains only those who might believe the rest of the con. But this doesn’t apply to phishing.

How to Protect Yourself From Phishing Attacks

Your email spam filters may keep many phishing emails out of your inbox. But scammers are always trying to outsmart spam filters, so it’s a good idea to add extra layers of protection. These are the few ways to protect yourself from such attack and which we could help you with at Netweakhackers too.

Something you have-like a passcode you get via text message or an authentication app. Something you are-like a scan of your fingerprint, your retina, or your face. Multi-factor authentication makes it harder for scammers to log in to your accounts if they do get your username and password.