Phishing (no, not Fishing) is when a malicious entity (Cyber-criminal) attempts to obtain information from you for financial benefit by attempting to disguise themselves as a trustworthy entity an electronic communications. This could be on social media, SMS, telephone or email.
So how do you spot a Phishing attempt? Here’s an email example.
So here you’ll see what appears to be an email from a trusted source, a company you may deal with daily. But now do you tel if it’s legitimate? Let’s open the message.
A closer look at the sender email address should start the alarm bells ringing – it’s not from an email address that even looks like it’s from PayPal. You an also bet that if you clicked on the link in the email, it may take you to a page that looks just like the PayPal login page, but again, the website address would be something completely different than the paypal.com that you might expect to be visiting for this.
If in doubt, DON’T CLICK on any link in an email like this. Instead visit the website in question directly by typing the known website address into your browser – in this case paypal.com.au or paypal.com.
