![]() Remember, the sender’s address can be spoofed or their account hacked. Your friend sends you a link that you weren’t expecting. If you didn’t know it was coming, there’s no guarantee it’s a legitimate email. Maybe it says that you need to log in and take care of something important. You get an unexpected email from your bank. But again, make sure it’s exactly what you’re expecting and you specifically remember requesting it. If they send you a link to confirm your email address, it’s okay to click it. You just signed up for an account on a website. If you get a tracking link that you weren’t expecting, or for a product you don’t recognize, delete the email right away. Just make sure it’s exactly what you’re expecting. Feel free to click the shipment tracking link in the email they send you. I suggest treating links like attachments. Very few people will ever take that advice. Well, if you don’t click any of them you won’t have a problem. They might not realize it’s there, and have possibly become a victim themselves. Sometimes people are just naive and forward an email to you that has a malicious link in it. But if that interests you then check out this guide for basic instructions. It requires digging through the email header which is, itself, prone to tampering. It can be very hard or impossible to tell if an email address is spoofed. It’s possible to spoof the sender’s address so it looks like it’s coming from someone you know, when in reality it’s coming from the bad guy’s email account. Unless the email seems out of the ordinary, you’ll have no way of knowing. This is dangerous because you may get a phishing email that’s actually sent from the real account of someone you know. If a spammer hacks an email account, he can send out an email blast to all the contacts stored in the account. But besides looking legitimate, there are other ways to fool us. Would you be able to tell the difference? Phishing Example 1 The trouble is, do you know which is which? Some bogus emails are obviously fake to most people, full of misspellings and shady suggestions. Why It’s Hard To Tell the Real from the Fake Malicious web pages are the most common way that I see computers get infected in my day job. Or it might even download the virus directly without going to a web page. The link may take you to a website that infects your computer with malware like ransomware or a keylogger (a “virus” that captures everything you type into your computer like passwords and credit card numbers). You’d probably be none the wiser.įor an ongoing list of phishing alerts, check out FraudWatch International’s page. And if he’s clever then it would redirect you to the real site afterward. The bad guy has now captured your login info. For example, the link takes you to a fake site that looks like your bank, and you try to log in with your username and password. Once on the site, the user is tricked into giving sensitive information. Phishing is the term for sending emails (considered the bait) with a link to a fake website. What Are The Dangers of Email Links? Phishing If you click this button, it actually goes to a special page I created. This is an official PayPal button I got from a site somewhere. You can never tell where a link will take you based on what it says. Why? Because the HTML code I made in the background told it to. This particular link will take you to Google. Nothing new, right? So where is this link going to take you? It can be hard to tell. So what exactly is possible with hyperlinks? Hyperlinks (“links”) are possible because of the HTML working in the background. Practically anything you can do with a web page, you can do with an email. It’s possible to send plain text emails (without HTML), but that’s rarely done these days. Emails are basically little web pages sent to your inbox. ![]() It’s the same language that websites are made with. How Email Links WorkĮmails are typically formatted in a language known as HTML. But what makes email links bad? What’s the worst that could happen if I do click one? This topic is cloudy for most people, so let’s break it down once and for all. This is by far one of the biggest ways I see clients get bitten. You’ve heard it a bazillion times: “Don’t click links in email!” That’s usually for a very good reason. 31 May, 2015 No Comments Bobby Email Security
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