10 Essential Tips to Shield Your Email from Phishing Attacks
The most obvious reason to protect your email account is to defend your privacy. Your email may carry sensitive messages, pictures, and other information. In addition, your email helps you secure some of the following types of accounts:
- Banking
- PayPal
- Video streaming
- Video gaming
- Other emails
For example, if someone attempts to change the password for your financial account, you may receive an alert on email. Or, if you forget your login credentials, you can use your email to recover them. You can also use your email to activate two-factor authentication and protect other accounts if your password is compromised.
That’s why hackers try to come up with creative ways to hack your email. By controlling your email account, they can breach your privacy more easily. So, what is hacking, and how does a hacker use social engineering to trick you?
Well, hacking is an activity where an entity tries to breach the network security of any digital device or an entire network. Meanwhile, social engineering is the process of using deception to manipulate you into compromising your network security or sharing your confidential data.
Phishing is the Most Coming Type of Social Engineering Attack
Although a phishing email may appear legitimate, it’s anything but authentic. You must secure email to protect against phishing. You should be careful when using a bulk email sender, everyone wants to get access to your account in search of valuable information. A phishing email may look like it’s from your financial institution, an antivirus company, government, retailer, vendor, customer, etc., and try to deceive you into downloading a corrupt attachment, clicking a dodgy link, or visiting a malicious website.
A malicious website might use clickjacking to install malware on your computer or simply have a fake checkout system devised to fool you into sharing your name, address, and credit card information. A phishing email can carry the following types of malware:
- A computer virus that deletes your files, folders and crashes your system.
- A computer worm that behaves like a virus, but spreads readily across your network
- The adware that bombards your screen with popup ads, hijacks your browser, and shares your browsing activity with marketers.
- Spyware that snoops on you and sends your confidential information to threat actors like hackers, stalkers, and trolls.
- Ransomware locks your computer until you pay a ransom to a hacker.
How to Shield Your Email from Phishing Attacks
- Be watchful when you receive an email from someone you don’t recognize.
- Handle emails that use generic greetings instead of your name carefully.
- Check emails to see if the email address matches the sender’s name.
- Hover your mouse cursor over a link to ensure that it matches the link description.
- Treat links that look like gibberish with extreme caution.
- Keep an eye out for strange spelling and grammatical mistakes from renowned brands.
- Be wary of offers that appear too good to be true.
- Never download unsolicited attachments.
- Activate email spam filters to block phishing emails sent in bulk.
- Don’t fall for emails that use alarmist language or create a false sense of urgency.
Some phishing emails can be quite persuasive. Use secure email to protect against phishing, fraudulent websites, dangerous links and stop malware threats from ruining your day. Vigilance, in combination with good cybersecurity tools, can defend you against phishing attacks.
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