Phishing has been a prevalent concern since the 1990s but has evolved significantly ever since. No matter how progressive one is in terms of cybersecurity and online safety, everyone can fall for an at-first-sight innocent link.
If you've never heard of phishing and what threats it poses, it's especially important to take a step back and learn how to protect yourself before it's too late.
Phishing, according to StationX, is the most common form of cybercrime. It's mainly implemented due to its ease of execution and the ability to reach a wider audience with one click. In fact, around 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent a day, which amounts to over a trillion phishing emails a year.
To help you protect yourself from this form of cybercrime, here are its signs and methods of defense.
5 Most Widespread Signs of Phishing
1. Suspicious Email Addresses
Scammers oftentimes reach out on behalf of legitimate organizations or trusted individuals, which makes it natural for them to use similar email addresses (of course, slightly altered to avoid suspicion). These changes include using misspelled words, adding extra characters, replacing periods with underscores and vice versa, substituting letters with numbers or similar characters, and more.
For example, if PayPal is emailing you from support@paypall.com (using two "I"s) instead of their legitimate email support@paypal.com, rest assured someone is trying to scam you.
For better protection, it's wise to reverse search the email address. A reverse email lookup can help you figure out who the email belongs to and get additional information about them, including their workplace and location.
2. Urgent and Threatening Language
Sometimes, but not always, phishing scammers create a sense of urgency and threaten their potential victims to speed up the process. Recipients, on the other hand, often fall for this, especially if the email says to pay outstanding taxes or pay off the loan debt. Of course, before crafting a convincing message, scammers carefully research the victim to make sure their real-life situation matches what's in the email.
Remember that legitimate organizations typically give time to respond and don't resort to high-pressure tactics.
3. Misspellings and Grammatical Errors
Most companies, especially high-profile organizations, proofread the emails they send out. Therefore, emails with errors and misspellings are a red flag, as they may originate from someone who's trying to defraud you.
Of course, we're all people; and even reputable companies can misspell a word or two. But note that too many errors signal that the email was likely not sent from the claimed source.
4. Requests for Personal Information
In most cases, scammers create fake login pages for the victim to enter their financial account information. For example, someone who's claiming to be from the bank may email you asking to log in to avoid your account being suspended. As a precaution, a recipient shouldn't click on that link from the email. The best course of action to take is to visit the bank's website directly or call the bank's customer support.
5. Too-Good-to-Be-True Offers
If you're the type of person who always participates in lotteries, quizzes, or similar activities or just someone who loves freebies, be careful. Too-good-to-be-true-offers often involve these, with scammers promising a prize for participating in a survey, money for clicking on a link and liking comments or pictures, and more.
Protection From Phishing: Here's What to Do
Don't Act in a Hurry
Of course, when attackers use high-pressure techniques and tell you to act fast, the first thing that you'd probably want to do is to give in to their requests. However, remember that slow and steady wins the race. And in our case, slow and steady doesn't lose their money and personal information.
Carefully examine the email and what's in it to check for any inconsistencies before acting. Pay special attention to the domain, grammatical errors in the message, and high-pressure tactics.
Most Importantly, Don't Click on Any Links
Even if the email seems to originate from a legitimate source, think twice before clicking on a link. Sometimes, high-pressure tactics are replaced by good treatment and the message is free from errors. If that's the case, it's hard to tell whether you're dealing with a scammer. For this, you need to explore further. The most effective method is to reach out to the company or person at their real number.
Add Spam Filters for Your Email
Spam filters will do all the legwork when it comes to checking the email. They help reduce unwanted or malicious emails in your inbox, therefore protecting you from individuals with harmful intentions.
As a general tip for all email providers, make sure to mark unwanted emails as spam, enable automatic spam protection, and add trusted senders to your contact list.
Avoid Making Payments
Requests for (immediate) payments are a red flag that screams "You're about to get scammed." No matter how convincing the story is, making payments without first talking directly to the company representatives is a mistake you'll likely later regret.
Making payments through untraceable channels, such as gift cards or paying in cryptocurrency, means you'll never recover your money.
Stay Informed
Scammers are regularly coming up with new methods to deceive people. Luckily, there are also those who spot these methods and tell the world about them. To stay informed about the latest phishing techniques, follow cybersecurity news and blogs, subscribe to alerts and newsletters, and attend webinars.
Let's Sum Up
It's easy to get into the hands of scammers who carefully implement phishing as their source of stealing money and personal information from individuals. However, by learning how to protect yourself from this fraudulent practice, you can easily prevent an attack.
First and foremost, pay attention to the most common signs of phishing. They may not always be one hundred percent the same, as different attackers use different methods. However, in many cases the signs are universal. Second, make sure you know how to safeguard your information and finances in case you ever encounter phishing.