Protect yourself from email scams

With the recent news regarding two email scams associated with Netflix and Gmail, we wanted to send a notice to our clients to help educate users on these attacks. Email is a much needed tool in the modern business world which makes it an ideal target for malicious individuals to exploit. As a maintenance customer, the Scylla Group team is proactively protecting your network to help mitigate these types of vulnerabilities. These precautionary steps include: spam filtering, antivirus, and patching the computers immediately following a security update release (Windows and 3rd party applications). This all helps fix the vulnerabilities these emails use to infect computers, but does not prevent all attacks. We believe that users can protect themselves by following some best practices:

Do not trust unsolicited email.

If you receive a message from an unknown individual treat the situation with caution. Make sure not to respond or open any email attachments until you confirm the source is legitimate.

Treat email attachments with caution.

Opening an email attachment is a quick way for malicious software to be installed on your computer. Once installed, the attacker may have access to all your data and can collect information down to the key strokes entered on your keyboard. If you are concerned about an attachment, save the file to your local machine and use your antivirus to scan the files before opening is a great practice. To run a scan, right click on the files and choose “Scan for Security Threats”.

Don’t click links in email messages.

This is a common attack mechanism in Phishing emails. Keep in mind, even if you read a link text as one website, the embedded link can take you to a scammers site; Some malicious sites have even been configured to look like the legitimate site so they can trick you into entering your password or downloading a file.. Before clicking a link, you can review where the link will take you by moving the mouse cursor over the text/image and seeing the true address like in this illustration.


You can read more about protecting yourself by going to https://www.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/publications/emailscams_0905.pdf

Staying alert to the potential attacks is a great way of saving yourself and company from being exploited.