´What are your top 3 tips to help others avoid phishing scams?´
There are plenty of tips on the internet that give great advice on how to avoid phishing scams, and there will be other authors on this site that will be giving very similar advice. For me though, it always comes down to the following three thoughts that I keep in mind whenever I see an email that could possible lead to a scam.
1. Is it too good to be true?
If the email in question is offering me something for nothing, especially if there is money, or a monetary value involved, this type of email falls into the “too good to be true” category. I have yet to come across an example of when someone really was giving away iPad’s, cash or holidays without some kind of quid pro quo involved. If your answer to the above question even looks like it might be a “yes”, the email and its contents can probably be ignored.
2. Don’t Click it!
Some people regularly send links in emails, others almost never; if that’s the case, ask yourself why they have suddenly started today seining you a link to a sneezing panda clip.
Finally, if your bank sends you a link to change your password because of system upgrades, don’t click the link they send, but go to your usual bookmark for them. Your bank should never do this anyway, but clicking on a link in an email like this is almost guaranteed to not send you to your bank, but a very convincing fake site set up to harvest your usernames and passwords. Just don’t click it.
3. Fail Safe
Read the other advice given on Information Security Buzz for this topic, and choose the advice that makes sense for you and your company. Three good pieces of easy to remember advice is going to be much more effective than ten pieces of fully qualified but difficult to remember advice.
Thom Langford | Sapient | Director, Global Security Office | @ThomLangford
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