Many people will tell you that such errors are part of a ‘filtering system’ in which cyber criminals target only the most gullible people. You can often tell if an email is a scam if it contains poor spelling and grammar. Everyone in your organisation must be confident in their ability to spot a scam upon first seeing it. Remember, criminal hackers only require one mistake from one employee for their operation to be a success. Launching subsequent scams that use this information takes minimal effort, and they can keep doing this until they find someone who falls victim. That is to say, indecisiveness in spotting a phishing scam provides clues to the scammer about where the strengths and weaknesses in your organisation are. Therefore, in many ways, criminal hackers often still win even when you’ve thwarted their initial attempt. since sounding alarm bells, he probably won’t include in the next phishing attempt. The reason Daniel had thought had done that is because he had sent the same email to a bunch of members of the team, and after looked at it for the fourth time, nobody else clicked on it.Īnd that’s okay for Daniel because he can try, like, all different methods of phishing the team, and he can try it a bunch of different times. But why does that help the hacker? Bennin elaborates: Don’t click on this email.īoteanu’s theory is precisely what happened. I’m guessing saw that something was going on, and he started digging a bit deeper and trying to find out what happened Īnd I’m suspecting that after, maybe sent an email internally saying, “Hey guys! This is what I got. He reasoned that the target’s curiosity kept bringing him back to the link but that he was suspicious enough not to follow its instructions. In this scam, the ethical hacker, Daniel Boteanu, could see when the link was clicked, and in one example, that it had been opened multiple times on different devices. His scam was so successful that he tricked the show’s hosts, Gimlet Media’s CEO and its president.Īs Bennin went on to explain, you don’t even need to fall victim for a criminal hacker to gain vital information. He bought the domain ‘’ (that’s r-n-e-d-i-a, rather than m-e-d-i-a) and impersonated Bennin. Phia Bennin, the show’s producer, hired an ethical hacker to phish various employees. The Gimlet Media podcast ‘Reply All’ demonstrated that in the episode What Kind Of Idiot Gets Phished?. Meanwhile, some fraudsters get even more creative. Here, scammers have registered the domain ‘’, which to a casual reader mimics the words ‘Microsoft Online’, which could reasonably be considered a legitimate address. If the email is from or another public domain, you can be sure it has come from a personal account. This dictates the organisation from which the email has been sent. However, you should remember that the important part of the address is what comes after the symbol. In this instance, the address might read first glance, you might see the word ‘PayPal’ in the email address and assume it is legitimate. Other phishing emails will take a more sophisticated approach by including the organisation’s name in the local part of the domain. However, the content of the message looks realistic, and the attacker has customised the sender’s name field so that it will appear in recipients’ inboxes as ‘Account Support’. In this example, you can see that the sender’s email address doesn’t align with the message’s content, which appears to be from PayPal. The most obvious way to spot a bogus email is if the sender uses a public email domain, such as Pickr For example, legitimate emails from Google will read the domain name (the bit after the symbol) matches the apparent sender of the email, the message is probably legitimate.īy contrast, if the email comes from an address that isn’t affiliated with the apparent sender, it’s almost certainly a scam. No legitimate organisation will send emails from an address that ends even Google.Įxcept for some small operations, most organisations will have their own email domain and company accounts. The message is sent from a public email domain This blog uses real phishing email examples to demonstrate five clues to help you spot scams.ġ. Meanwhile, Verizon’s 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 25% of all data breaches involve phishing. Phishing is one of the most common types of cyber crime, but despite how much we think we know about scam emails, people still frequently fall victim.Īccording to Proofpoint’s 2022 State of the Phish Report, 83% of organisations fell victim to a phishing attack last year.
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