Cybercrime is a big business! Lots of money can be made by stealing other people’s financial information. The majority of the time a computer or network gets infected because someone clicks on something within an email they received.
Be on alert for any email that requires immediate action or has a negative consequence if you don’t respond, offers that are too good to be true or asks you to resolve an urgent problem. It is wise not to open email or attachments unless you know the person, but you still have to be careful since emails can be spoofed. Email spoofing is when the sender’s address of an email is forged for the purposes of social engineering.
Below are some best practices for email security.
- Use a strong email filtering
- Do not make a purchase from an unsolicited email
- If you do not know the sender of an unsolicited email, delete it. Don’t unsubscribe since the link might be infected.
- Verify the from address. You can be fooled by a slight alteration of a known email address.
- Do not open email attachments that end with: exe., scr, bat,.com or other executable files you do not recognize.
- Hover over all links embedded within the email to ensure they are inline with the email sender.
- Don’t unsubscribe to any emails. It is safer just to delete since the “unsubscribed” link might be infected.
If you have any doubt if the email is questionable, don’t open it.
