Phishing is a fraudulent tactic used by cyber criminals to try and obtain personal information such as passwords, credit card numbers, or to deploy malicious software on the victim’s computer.  One of the primary methods scammers use is email, where they appear to be from a known business or organization, but in reality, are fraudulent.

According to Alert Logic, nearly 1.5 million phishing sites are created each month and the typical user received an average of 16 phishing emails per month.

How can you tell if the email you received is real? If you look closely at the sender’s email address you will notice a domain name after the @ sign. For example, if the email purports to be from Amazon, the address should have amazon.com somewhere after the @ sign in the email address. If it contains anything other than the business’ domain, you should delete it immediately. Fraudulent emails also often contain grammatical mistakes or misspellings.

Some Examples of Phishing

One example of phishing is an email that informs you to update your username and password. Another example would be receiving an email asking you to enter login details (on a replica of the website you think you are visiting). Again, you want to look closely at the domain name and if it does not match leave immediately. You then want to run your anti-virus software and clear your cache and cookies through your browsers Settings, then Privacy and services.

Phishing attacks have become more sophisticated with some internet criminals creating mirror web sites that look like the real website. These fabricated sites allow the criminal to observe everything on the victim’s computer while they navigate the site.  According to the FBI, phishing was the most common type of cybercrime in 2020—and phishing incidents nearly doubled in frequency, from 114,702 incidents in 2019, to 241,324 incidents in 2020. If you suspect you have received a phishing email you can report it to the Federal Bureau of Investigations Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

If you use Outlook, you can report suspicious emails to Microsoft by select the phishing email you want to report. Select Junk in the Outlook toolbar and choose Phishing in the drop-down menu. Select Report to send Microsoft a phishing email notice. The email will be automatically moved to your Junk Email folder. Google’s Gmail and other email platforms have similar capabilities.