Do you read an email attentively? I know most of the answers are negative. What we actually do, we just skim through the email and often click on a link that we see on it. This habit can be so much destructive to you and your online accounts of various sites that you cannot even imagine. These types of emails are called phishing email which is a sub sector under the phishing attacks that are the most common cyberattacks nowadays; today we are going to talk about it so that we become smarter dealing with our mails.
What is Phishing Email?
A phishing email is one kind of cyber-crime that is used to deceive an email user by thieving his/her valuable personal information. In the last few decades, email has become so much common as a communication medium; the cybercriminals have also taken this opportunity for fulfilling their evil activity like different types of cyber attacks like DDoS attacks, Ransomware attack, phishing attempts of various types, etc. A phishing email can be brutally dangerous for your personal secrets, bank account, or social media accounts.
Thinking about the serious harm that phishing mail can do to you, one may wonder why we are not talking more about this phenomenon. It’s imperative that we know a little deep about phishing mail for our online secured life; firstly we will try to go into the hacker’s mind and understand the working process of a phishing email.
How does Phishing Email work?
The hacker, cracker, or cyber-criminal whatever you want to call them; surf the internet world and somewhere find your email address. You may ask how they find our email address in the first place. Well, It’s not that difficult; your email address can be found on your social media profile, or you may have opened an account on some of the legitimate websites using the email address and the hacker has some sort of connection to that; or even the acquainted one who you knew as a clean guy and secretly he/she is a hacker, you just never know.
Now, we come to the main part; the cyber-criminal sends you an email like a spam mail that looks like from a legitimate site that you know very well. The email can contain security vulnerability information of your social media accounts, bank account, or your personal website; it may ask you for passwords of these sites or provide you a link so that you can rescue your accounts. If you do not recognize these fraudulent emails and do whatever they tell you to do, then you are in trouble. The hackers will implant malware on your device upon clicking on the provided link or replying to them and the malware will be used to get access to your personal information. After that the password of your bank account or Facebook account is changed by the hackers; that’s how you can lose your property and the hackers can be the gainers.
How to Recognize a Phishing Email?
There are few characteristics of a phishing email for you to recognize. But bear in mind that these are not common in every phishing mail. Also, another fact is that the criminals are generally smart in their evil work; and they are always trying to make it even more difficult for you to distinguish the fishy emails from the legitimate ones. If you want to be smarter than them, then read your emails carefully and try to figure out-
Does the Sender Know Your Name?
Phishing email more often than not contains salutation with generic words like ‘Dear Customer’ or ‘Hello’. The real websites where you have an account know your name and will surely address you with it.
Is the mail too lucrative?
Many phishing emails lure you saying that you have won a lottery of a handsome sum; if you have nothing to do with that site know for sure it’s spam. These are like trap phishing, spear phishing.
Is the Mail Demanding Personal Information?
The legitimate sites never ask for your password or any other valuable information through an email. Whaling Phishing generally targets the official individuals.
Does it Contain a Link?
In phishing, attaching a link with the email is a common method for forcing you to visit a site that was not intended and thus inflict your device with malware virus.
Are the Spellings Correct?
Most often emails are not read carefully; the criminals take the advantage of this fact and send the mail from a site that was created using almost the identical name of a real site. Can you figure out the difference between Netflix.com and Nelflix.com? Read carefully.
Conclusion
Next time you open up an email try to remember today’s learning. A little bit of knowledge about phishing emails can make your life and your property secured. Hopefully, the article is beneficial to you. We always suggest you set your PC security properly for be secured e time.
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