Beware of email fraud

Email fraud is the intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual by means of email. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people.   

One of the more common scams these days is Phishing Emails.  

Phishing emails are crafted to look as if they’ve been sent from a legitimate organization. These emails attempt to fool you into visiting a bogus website to either download malware (viruses and other software intended to compromise your computer) or reveal sensitive personal information. The perpetrators of phishing scams carefully craft the bogus website to look like the real thing. Recognizing and Avoiding Email Scams For instance, an email can be crafted to look like it is from a major bank. It might have an alarming subject line, such as “Problem with Your Account.” The body of the message will claim there is a problem with your bank account and that, in order to validate your account, you must click a link included in the email and complete an online form. The email is sent as spam to tens of thousands of recipients. Some, perhaps many, recipients are customers of the institution. Believing the email to be real, some of these recipients will click the link in the email without noticing that it takes them to a web address that only resembles the address of the real institution. If the email is sent and viewed as HTML, the visible link may be the URL of the institution, but the actual link information coded in the HTML will take the user to the bogus site. 

For example visible link: http://www.yourbank.com/accounts/  

Actual link to a bogus site: http://itcare.co.kr/data/yourbank/index.html  

The bogus site will look astonishingly like the real thing and will present an online form asking for information like your account number, your address, your online banking username, and password—all the information an attacker needs to steal your identity and raid your bank account. 

Email fraud may be avoided by:  

• Not responding to suspicious emails.  
• Using a spam filter.  
• Noticing several spelling errors in the body of the “official-looking” email.  
• Ignoring unsolicited emails of all types and deleting them.  
• Not clicking on links. 
• Not opening unexpected attachments, even if they appear to be from someone the user trusts.    
• Install antivirus software and keep it up to date. 
• Install a personal firewall and keep it up to date. 
• Configure your email client for security

Be vigilant in protecting your company.