Phishing Scams

Anyone who has been using email for any length of time has had to deal with the problem of spam or unsolicited bulk email. While spam may at times a nuisance, its only purpose is to advertise a product or service. Within the past few years a new kind of email fraud has arisen that goes beyond advertising into identity theft called phishing.

A phishing email is a cleverly disguised message that purports to come from your bank or other online account asking you to update your account information on a website. The link to the bank's website is displayed as http://www.suntrust.com/, but the address behind the link actually takes you to another website that looks and feels like Sun Trust Bank. Since everything looks normal to the average person they type in their username and password and possibly even credit card number which is then captured by the website and the user is told that everything is now updated. Meanwhile the perpetrator takes the user's account information and uses it to steal money and even may attempt to steal his identity.

There are several ways to protect you and your business from phishing scams. The primary way to avoid phishing scams is to educate yourself. No legitimate bank or online account will contact you in an email asking for your account information. Know which companies you have accounts with and use separate passwords for different accounts. There are also some technical ways to protect yourself. Be sure to keep your computers up to date with the latest security patches. Make sure you are using Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla Firefox on your Windows computers. Both Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox have anti-phishing technologies built in to detect phishing websites and will prevent you from visiting those sites before you get a chance to give any secure information away. The best technical protection you can have is to keep the phishing emails from getting to your Inbox at all by having a good email filtering solution like VOLstate's Spamtrap. If you need assistance in protecting your business from phishing, spam, and virus-laden email contact us at VOLstate.