How To Report Phishing Emails
I have heard of Phishing scams. They are actually quite scary - a seemingly-important email, from a business you know, asks you to login in and correct information on your account. Without knowing it, your browser is redirected to what they call a 'mirror' site - one that looks enough like the official site to fool the casual observer - and you enter your personal information. Oops! You've now given identity thieves just what they need.Because I have a business, write articles, and receive personal messages from friends and family, I have several email addresses. Althought there's a bit of bleed over between the business and personal accounts, each one is (mostly) dedicated to particular uses. Because of this, I can usually tell, at a glance if something that wanders into my inbox is meant for that address or, better yet, meant for me at all.
While I put my faith in spam filters, it's not uncommon for valid messages to land in a spam folder or spam to sneak into an inbox. So, I do give a cursory glance at all of the messages in both folders, several times a day, just in case. Which leads me to the purpose of this post - bet you thought I'd never get there, didn't you?!
Over the past couple of weeks, I've gotten some interesting messages in a couple of my spam folders, telling me that the payment for my AdWords account failed to go throught, so my account had been suspended. That would be serious, if I actually had an AdWords account. Since I do use Google products for income and marketing, through one specific email address, I decided I'd best see what was going on. That was when I almost got phished!
I say almost because I've activated my browsers' options to check for forgery sites. The instant that I clicked on the link in the message, a large box with lots of Red letters and exclamation points !! I backed out (one of the options in the big box), deleted the message and was happy I'd activated that browser option.
This is the response I received today, after reporting another phishing email.
For additional information on how to recognize and avoid phishing scams, cut and paste the following link into your web browser:
http://www.us-cert.gov/reading_room/emailscams_0905.pdf
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the public and private sectors. Established in 2003 to protect the nation's Internet infrastructure, US-CERT coordinates defense against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation.
US-CERT interacts with federal agencies, industry, the research community, state and local governments, and others to disseminate reasoned and actionable cyber security information to the public.
Your report will assist US-CERT in the identification of emerging cyber-security threats.
Thank you,
US-CERT Operations Center
888-282-0870
soc@us-cert.gov
http://www.us-cert.gov
Please feel free to use this information and save the email address soc@us-cert.gov, so that you can report any and all phishing emails you might receive. Additionally, make sure that you activate Security Features.
In FireFox:
Tools >>
Options >>
Security >>
{check} Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery
In Internet Explorer:
Tools >>
Internet Options >>
Advanced scroll down to:
Security Section: scroll down to:
Phishing Filter:
{check} Turn on automatic website checking
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