An envelope with an @ sign in red and a fishing hook through the corner of the envelope to depict email phishing

What is Email Phishing?

Posted by Jim Hochard on

Email phishing is a form of fraud perpetrated by an attacker attempting to acquire your sensitive and private information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, as well as, financial or investment account information. These invaders appear to be a trustworthy entity reaching out to you via an email.  Often there is a clickable link within their message. One click will take you to a fraudulent website which looks and appears creditable but, in actuality, is nothing of the sort.  Once you have connected to their site, these thieves have the capability to install malware (harmful software such as viruses or Trojans designed to cause damage or disruption to your computer system) onto your computer. Or even worse, they can install a key logger to pick up your keystrokes.  They can then analyze those keystrokes to steal other credentials and passwords. These invaders often employ Java scripts to hide their true URL address by displaying someone else’s legitimate URL address.

I highly recommend using a good Internet Security Software program which contains an email scanner.   In conjunction with your own security system, your email provider should have a good gateway email filter in place which should capture the bulk of the phishing mail.  These two programs working together will keep the phishing emails to a minimum.

Most phishing emails can be spotted by reading them carefully. Misspelled words or improper grammar is an immediate signal that the email is fraudulent and should be deleted immediately. If an email in your inbox looks unauthentic and viewing it in a preview pane reveals misspellings and or bad grammar . . .a simple trick to determine its validity is: right click on the email which will open up a menu pane, left click on “PROPERTIES”, and check the return email address. Still not sure? Call the company, bank or financial institution to make sure they sent you the email or check their website. If there is a massive phishing campaign on against its clients, it will be prominently listed on the first page of their site.

 

A picture stressing the point of backing up your data from all devices,: computers, laptops, handhelds

Back up your data!

Posted by Jim Hochard on

As Benjamin Franklin stated, ” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”  The same holds true when you are putting together your strategy for backing up your data on your desktop, laptop, or handheld devices. We now use a variety of devices to access and create email, data, and check and maintain our calendar. Your desktop computer and laptop should be backed up both locally on your network to an external drive and also on the cloud to have your data stored off site. Cell phones and tablets can be set to back up your data to the cloud provided by the manufacturer. Your email accounts, if not internet based, ie. gmail, hotmail, aol, should be setup for IMAP. This not only allows you to access and manage your email from multiple devices, your emails are stored on their email server.

With all this in place, when a calamity occurs you will be prepared. Whether that calamity is a failed hard drive, virus, or physical damage to a handheld. If the unexpected happens, within a few hours and you can be back up and running with no lost data. Apprehensive about storing your data on the a Cloud server? We all think who can be sifting threw our data. Make sure your data is encrypted on the server. By adding encryption to your data on the cloud, you add that extra vital level of security to assure your data is safe from prying eyes and hackers.