Many people have contacted me in the past with “I just got an email and I don’t know if I can trust this”.

I’m talking about one of the pests of our time which is called

Phishing

Phishing, yes it’s coming from fishing – somebody is fishing to catch your passwords and logins to emails and anything money.  It is an attempt to make you believe a known service like a bank, your streaming service or else wants you urgently to resolve a situation. They then send you by a doctored link to a website, where they have copied the layout of the company, so that you enter your credentials like bank details, credit card details or another login. And then your money or your account suddenly is no longer available!

I have an example just from today, trying to make me believe my Netflix account membership will be cancelled soon.

Well, I was not an easy victim of this as I don’t have a Netflix membership 😉

So how can we find out what is a genuine email and a genuine link?

First of all click on the email address to reveal the actual sender’s address

It is saying coming from Netflix – but, when clicking the sender’s name…

Now support@blog.stipender.com does not look like it’s coming from Netflix at all?! Besides that, our trusty mail program has already put a loud warning up about being a suspected Junk Mail.

But what about this bright red button “Restart Membership” what happens if we click on it? Don’t!

The trick to reveal a link is to hover your cursor over it to reveal the address it is linking to.

I don’t think “guiseppemondo.com” has anything to do with Netflix at all.

More Phishing

Another phishing method is to send you a link which looks like it is belonging to your bank but guides you to a different website.

Let’s say you get an email with a link to your bank.

The link itself looks genuinely pointing to your bank. But by hovering your cursor over it:

it reveals itself as an alien. Yes it has “abcbank” in the address, but the main domain is the one before the last dot to the right, and that points to the domain “hackme.co” (by the way “.co” is a domain name of Colombia).