Phishing Phor Phun and Prophit

Have you received an email about an overdue parking ticket or a delivery from UPS lately? Have you blindly clicked on the link in that email? Odds are you are now a victim of phishing, and you had better change all your passwords and turn on lots of security settings on all of your accounts.

As I saw with my daughter and her experience with Phishing, the Phishers are getting much more clever and are relying on your false sense of security. If the email looks official most folks will readily click to easily track or fix a simple problem.

What kind of emails do they send?

• Overdue parking ticket reminder. By the way, how did they get your email address for a parking ticket?
• Income Tax related notices, and no the CRA still doesn’t take iTunes cards to pay your taxes (I checked). Again, how does the CRA know your email address?
• Your bank or other financial institution has found a problem with your bank account or credit card and you just need to click here to fix it. Worse, they have a new App you can run on your phone, just click here to download it.
• Fed Ex or UPS has a package that they couldn’t deliver, so you need to reschedule the delivery.

All of these seem straight forward and far too easy to bamboozle you.

What should you do when you receive one of these phishing hooks?

• Don’t open it, surprisingly, depending on how your email reader is set up, that alone can be lethal (make sure you don’t allow auto-execute scripts on your email reader)
• If you have opened the email CLICK ON NOTHING.
• If you are on GMAIL you can contact Google here about the email
• Delete the email (and then empty your recycle bin)

As we become better at not falling for these tricks, the tricks just get trickier, or as Roddy Piper used to say, “Just when they think they got the answers, I change the questions!”.