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Avoiding Email Phishing Scams

Date: 2011-04-12 15:14:27

Epsilon, a major email service provider, was recently breached losing a large amount of email data. Security professionals predict this will result in a large uptick of targeted phishing attacks. Many are calling this more targeted attach "spear phishing".

Traditional phishing is very random. This is where someone sends an unsolicited email to a large number of email addresses hoping a user will respond. It usually looks like it is coming from some bank you never heard of asking you to update security information. On occasion, it may be from the very bank you use. This is what the perpetrator is waiting for: The "one in 100,000" user who gets a fake email from the very bank they use. Or even more vulnerable is the "one in 1 million" chance that you just happened to do something at that very establishment, and then you get this chance phishing email.

When criminals get more specific intelligence on a user, they can make a more targeted attack, to lower the odds from maybe 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1 million to something more like 1 in 1000. (I'm making all these odds up by the way, to illustrate the point). This means that over the next few weeks and months everyone has to be a little more skeptical about any emails.

Brian Krebs, whom I consider to be the most respected computer security journalist in the field today, has this excellent article on the subject.

Category: Email

Subcategory: Phishing

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