Secure Online Activities

In today’s digital world, email is a vital tool for communication, enabling us to connect and share information effortlessly. But amid the convenience, our inboxes can harbour dangers like phishing and scam emails. Knowing how to identify and guard against these threats is crucial for keeping your online activities secure. Here’s what you need to know:

Spotting Malicious Emails

Phishing emails are cleverly designed to trick recipients into sharing sensitive information or clicking on harmful links. They frequently impersonate trusted sources like banks, government agencies, or popular online services and create a sense of urgency to prompt quick action. It’s crucial to scrutinize the sender’s email address carefully—phishers often employ deceptive techniques, such as misspelt or closely resembling email addresses, to impersonate legitimate entities. For instance, an email from “service@paypa1.com” or “service@paypaI.com“. The last one uses something called homoglyph, which is a letter that looks more or less identical to another letter. So, in this case, the last one has a capital i(I) instead of a lowercase l(L), and one could use tools like https://email-checker.net/ or text editor and change the font to verify the provided email address.

Understanding Phishing

Phishing represents a type of social engineering in which cybercriminals employ deceptive strategies to manipulate individuals into revealing personal information or undertaking actions that endanger their security. These scammers may utilize psychological ploys like urgency, greed, or fear to compel victims to fulfil their demands. It’s crucial to understand that phishing attacks can be highly sophisticated and convincing, even for experienced professionals.

Scam Email in Action

Let’s use an example and walk through some steps from such an email. A friend of mine received this email, as shown below. The name has been removed for security reasons and replaced with “username.” 

Okay, let us see what we got here. Firstly, we won a gift card worth 500$, then below, we just need to confirm to receive the money! Easiest money ever! Oh, and there is a time limit, so I better hurry. 

Hmm, this smells a bit fishy. Let’s analyse this a bit closer. Okay, so first, we see that the people who sendt these are using greed and urgency by giving us something free for a short amount of time. This is a commonly used strategy to get people to click these links by inflicting greed and stress. There are some other common ones as well, such as telling you, “Oh no! Your account has been hacked and needs immediate attention. Just click this link and reset the password now.” But let’s get back to the email. Hovering over these links, we can see the URL of where it would like to take us. (URL have been altered for safety reasons) 

That does not look like the domain for Sams Club. Taking some security measures and using a disposable Virtual machine set up for this, I decided to click these links. Clicking these links redirects me to some spam websites with a lot of commercials and sudden pop-up spam windows, and the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email sends me over to something that X (Twitter) blocked and deemed unsafe. soo we confirmed it’s not Sams Club. These links can take many forms and have many purposes. The redirected sites might have embedded malware on them, meaning that when you visit the website, it will try to download something onto your device. Some links look legit, for example, a social media account login that looks like Facebook wants you to log in as usual, but then once you have written your credentials into the site, it will redirect you to the original site but save the login credentials. The malicious actor now has access to your social media. Or you might be safe if you’re like me and always write the wrong password on the first few login attempts.

Moving on and getting a bit more geeky here, we can go into the email header and analyse it for more info.

Using a tool called VScode, we see that even though they marked it to be from noreply@samsclub.com we can see that where it says In-Reply-To is something completely different. (the address has been modified for security reasons), the “In-Reply-To” email is basically the address that would get an email if you would reply to this. So it is pretty evident that this is not a legit email, and we have not won 500$. But if you are still unsure if the email you are looking at is actual or not, manually type in the address for the designated company in the search bar, contact their support, and ask them, and they will know. 

Summary

  1. Treat emails from unknown senders with caution. Before taking any action, carefully examine the sender’s email address and scrutinise it for any irregularities or suspicious elements.
  2. Read through the email carefully; some scam emails are often filled with typos and weirdly structured sentences.
  3. Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from unfamiliar or unexpected emails. Instead, manually type the known URL into your browser or contact the sender through a trusted means to verify the authenticity of the message.
  4. Hover your mouse cursor over links in emails to preview the destination URL. Verify that the link corresponds to a legitimate website before clicking.
  5. Be wary of emails that request sensitive information or prompt you to log in to accounts. Legitimate organisations will never ask you to provide passwords or financial details via email.
  6. When in doubt, trust your instincts and err on the side of caution. If an email seems suspicious or too good to be true, it’s likely a phishing attempt.

By adopting these practices and staying vigilant, you can fortify your defences against phishing and scam emails, lowering the risk of falling victim to these scams.