Ep 14 Phishing

14 what is Phishing

How to Recognize and Avoid Phishing Scams

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-recognize-and-avoid-phishing-scams

Hello. Welcome back to USB our Guest, Cyber Security Tips. Thank you for adding us to your Routine.

Today's Tip is about Phishing. A good article about Recognizing Phishing and tips to avoid them is on the the Federal Trade Commission's website. A link will be in the show notes.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is the practice of sending emails masquerading as a trusted entity, to fool someone into revealing personal info such as passwords or credit card numbers.  Every type of communication has it's own type of phishing. For this tip we are focusing on email phishing.

A phishing email will look like an email from Amazon saying that your delivery is delayed and to click the tracking number to fix, and then redirecting you to a fake sign in screen for Amazon where your credentials will be stole if you enter them. Or an email from netflix asking you to update your payment details and asking you to click on a button that says "update account now". Then redirecting you to a fake netflix account screen where your credit card number will be stolen if you enter your info.

Other phishing attempts could say, you must confirm personal info, include a fake invoice, say you're eleigible for a government refund or offer a coupon for free items

If you think you are being phished, Don't click on anything. Pause for a moment, and call the creditor, company, or government agency from a phone number listed on their website or invoice. Do not call a number found in the suspected phishing email or links that the email takes you to.

The FTC offers the following suggestions to protect yourself from a phishing attack

First, protect your phone and Computer from attack by setting them to automatically update. Almost all major Technology companies include security fixes to their updates. any amount of time that you do not install them is leaving your device vulnerable to an attack.

Second, enable Two-factor or Mult-factor authentication on all of your accounts that offer it. They basically require to supply additional credentials to log in to your account. I did an episode on Two-factor authorization. Just pull it up and take a listen from the previous episodes.

Finally, Protect your data by backing it up. I'm planning on doing an episode on backups soon.

That all for today except for a few show related items. If you like what we're doing here please take a minute to rate and review us on whatever podcast platform you are using. Also, I'm planning on making the episodes a little longer around 5 min with a short 30 sec ad to help with a little revenue. Please bear with me as I figure out a good placement for this and remember that 30 seconds, is 2 - 15 second skips.

Thank you again for listening and we'll talk to you again soon