Email Security

I would like to remind everyone about the importance of keeping your email account secure. I hope the following helps but I encourage you do whatever additional research you need to clarify any actions you need to take.

Where are the dangers?

At this present time we are more than ever dependent on email and social media. Unfortunately, the bad guys are taking advantage of this. The website ITProPortal reports:

According to security firm Barracuda Networks, 137 coronavirus-related phishing emails were identified in January, 1,188 in February and over 9,000 in March.

Each of these emails were probably used tens or hundreds of thousands of times.

[Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. (Wikipedia).]

Note that your anti-virus software will not protect you against the latest phishing attacks.

How to read emails safely

The following is a brief summary only. For more guidance, Google “phishing”.

  1. Don’t open suspect emails, however intriguing
  2. Be very , very, very careful before you click on any link in an email.
  3. Do not rely on recognising the senders name.
    1. It is trivially easy to make an email look as if it is coming from a familiar account when in fact it has been sent from a malicious sender.
    1. If the sender’s email credentials have been compromised, a malicious sender could use your friend’s account. If you think this is the case, you should warn the sender but do not use the Reply option.
  4. Check the content for danger signs
    1. No text in the subject line, or text in the subject line which does not specifically relate to you e.g. “You will be interested in this”
    1. Body content requesting you to take urgent action
    1. Bad grammar.
  5. Consider not using an email content preview pane next to your inbox listing.
  6. Of course you need Windows and your antivirus software to be up to date but that is automatic these days.
  7. Finally do not take any chances.

It is entirely up to you to protect the security of your email account.

This is also true in the case of Data breaches.

Data breaches occur when a company storing details of many users is broken in to. For an insight of the historic risk to you of this type of activity, see the website https://haveibeenpwned.com/.

Remember that each username+password combination should be used for one account only. Unfortunately, these days, every service you use, will ask you to sign up for an account, so that they can contact you.

The signup form will ask for your email address and a password. Having entered your email address, if your next thought is “What is my email password?” you might end up giving your personal email password to the company, whose security could be less than adequate. It is these companies that the bad hackers target, the reward being hundreds of thousands of account credentials that they can use.

Remember that no-one will go to the trouble of hacking specifically into your personal email account.

So if you have used the same password for your email account and other accounts, you should change your email password on all your devices.

Also, consider using a password manager program for convenience and safety.

Please contact me if you need any more clarification.

Stay safe – also online.

Peter Bayliss