Watch out for eMail Phishing Scams!
Last week I received several emails with the subject "You have outstanding UPS invoices". This week there is a new wave of "You have received a new payment", supposedly from Intuit.
Watch out for messages like these! They're fakes, also known as phishing messages. The goal of the email is to catch you off guard (many look very real unless you look closely), and get you to enter financial information.
A few years back, messages like this were full of typos and low quality graphics so they were easier to spot, but the "bad guys" have gotten more clever recently.
To undertand how the social engineering works, here's an example of what occured at one of our client sites: A manager received a message like this, thought it was real, and forwarded the email to his employee and asked her to take care of it because he was busy. The employee then followed through with the instructions, never thinking twice because the request had come from her boss.
Watch out! You can hover over the links to see what they really are (the sender can write anything they want in the link that you see!). Also check the message header to see where its really from. In Outlook 2010, select the "file" tab and then select the "properties" button to view the full email header (which contains much more information than the simple "To", "From", and "Subject" you see on the actual email you receive.
Stay alert! We have seen several of these messages in our inboxes (takes a while for spam filters to catch up), and many clients have called to report problems. Slow down and check the email carefully before taking action. |