Throw Your Hat Into the Ring!

  What is phishing? (Not fishing!) Phishing is a type of email sent out by scammers to obtain personal, private information about you. They could be looking for login information and passwords. They might be trying to get your bank or credit card information. Or, it could be your address, date of birth, or Social Security number. In any case, we have to be ever-vigilant, whenever we open any email sent to us.

  I consider myself to be very astute in determining phishing emails. I seem to get at least one per day at one of my email addresses. However, I’ve almost succumbed to a few. One that particularly sticks in my mind happened a couple years ago. I got an email from PayPal (or so it seemed). The email proceeded to tell me that the username and password they had on file for my financial institution was not working, and they needed me to verify it. Now, I should have known right away that it was a scam. First, had I looked at the return email address, it would not have been @paypal.com. It might’ve been @paypal.email.com, or @pay.pal.com, or something similar. However, I didn’t check that on this particular email. The second clue was that, even though I’d had a PayPal account at one time, it was closed by the time I received the email.

  So, I gladly fed them the information they were looking for. Immediately after I clicked the Send button, I got this awful feeling in my gut. I immediately logged on to my account at my bank’s website and changed my password. A day or two later, I entered my user name and password combination. I was locked out. The scammers used my logon with the password I had given them (which no longer was the right one), and had tried it enough times that the bank locked my account. Had I not gotten that feeling in the pit of my stomach, my account probably would have been emptied!

  Google, in conjunction with Stanford University, recently studied over a billion malicious emails that targeted Gmail users. Here are some of their conclusions.

1. There are more than 100 million phishing and spear phishing emails daily.
2. The United States, United Kingdom, and Japan, in that order, are the three most-targeted countries.
3. People between 55 and 64 are 1.64 times more likely than folks between 18 and 24 years of age.
4. People whose personal information had been compromised in a data breach were 5 times more likely targeted than those who were not compromised.

  How can you protect yourself?

1. Remember the old adage, “Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.”
2. Be skeptical of any email asking for your personal information or asking you to click on a link.
3. Check the email address of the sender.
4. Take a moment and think: if you don’t have a Chase account and you receive an email telling you that your Chase account is in jeopardy of being closed, Hello! It’s a scam email!
5. Look at the email address: An email from Chase will most likely come from Chase.com, not whatchamacallit@hotmail.com.
6. Instead of clicking on a link, open the site of the alleged sender in your browser. Use Google or Bing, or even better, DuckDuckGo if you need the company’s web address.
7. Use a good antimalware program. I will not recommend any one app, but I use Microsoft’s own Windows Security. As a backup, I rely on Malwarebytes. However, do your own research. A good place to start is ZDNet.com (https://www.zdnet.com/article/best-antivirus/)

Source, Scamicide

All the best,

Dan Fisher, Webmaster