Have you received emails asking to verify an order for a product that you never placed? How about an email asking you to contact your bank to discuss charges or activity that you never created? These types of emails are called phishing (pronounced “fishing”), because the criminals are fishing for your information. The type of information they’re most interested in are your username, password and credit card details. Phishing is a form of social engineering where the criminals pretend to be different businesses, banks, etc. They may even copy the legitimate company’s website in every detail in an effort to gain your trust so you’ll willingly give them your information.
One good way to avoid becoming a victim of a phishing scam is to scrutinize emails carefully. Many times you can simply hover your mouse over links and on the bottom of the web browser you will see the name of the link you will be forwarded to once you click your mouse button. Also look for misspellings within the email (criminals are generally dumb like that). Claims in the message stating elements of urgency are also big tell tale signs of a phishing email.
Another way to avoid phishing scams is to subscribe to our antivirus service. We also utilize browser extensions which work with the antivirus program and are capable of examining the headers of website links. It will then prevent forwarding you to their site. Our antivirus service also examines IPs along with information obtained from unencrypted web traffic.
Contact us if you are the victim of a phishing scam or want to utilize our services and prevent from becoming a victim in the first place!