If you’ve signed up for online accounts and services, you likely get plenty of emails, some of them interesting and others not so much. It’s important to unsubscribe from, or block outright, any emails that look like phishing attempts (e.g., asking you to reply with personal information). Most emails from mailing lists have unsubscribe buttons […]

Frequently ransomware is distributed through phishing emails or through drive-by downloads. Many times, phishing emails seem as though they have been sent from a genuine company or someone well-known to the victim and attract the user to click on a malicious link or open a malicious attachment. A drive-by download is a program that is […]

Many services require account verification via email or another channel. Unfortunately, scammers have exploited this setup, most famously in a series of phishing emails claiming to be from Amazon. Carefully read every email and look for the tell-tale signs of a scam, including typos, lengthy sender email addresses and urgent calls to action.

Many phishing scams involve the phisher posing as a major retailer and then sending emails claiming to contain coupons that you redeem by clicking them in an email. To stay safe, never click on one of these offers if it seems to good to be true, comes from a long/garbled email address or is contained in a […]

Here are some tip-offs that can alert you to a phishing email: Misspellings; grammatical mistakes; including your email address in the subject line; no acknowledgement of your name; requests to verify your account; warnings that your account has been compromised. Spotting these can reduce the risk of being a phishing email victim. Total Defense is […]

There’s a common technique of sending direct mail disguised as courts summons or other official documentation, to make a response more likely. Many phishing emails take basically the exact same approach, only in digital form. That is, they might use all-caps subject lines (e.g., “URGENT:”) to make it seem like action is required. It isn’t. […]