Education in recognition – online safety.

We all get, from time to time, an email with a file attached to it, whether in our business or personal mailbox. Those attachments should never ask you to log into Microsoft, Outlook or Google accounts etc. If this is the case, it means that it is a phishing scam designed to gather your login information to those sites.

Through them cyber criminals get access to your email and from there to all the contacts that have ever used your email. It grows exponentially. Using your email account, they send “infected” emails to all your contacts, who then, unknowingly infect all of their contacts and it just goes on and on. Not mentioning the fact that they gain access to the vast amount of information that is stored in your email.

There, usually is a delay between the scammers gaining access to your email and using it to “infect” others. Thus, you don’t know that your account has been compromised for months following the episode, leaving you wide open to any kind of cybercrime.

If you ever suspect that you are compromised, make sure you go and change your login information on all the most important sites. In fact, any site that you might use for banking and well as login into your email account and any site you use for purchasing online should have your login information changed often. These logins should be unique to each site and difficult to guess. There are password managers that will help you in generating such passwords and store them for you allowing you to access them easily and safely on any device you are using.

Only by being proactive and using safe online practices (you can find a bit more about it in my previous post: Online Security), including education in recognition of scams, can we protect ourselves from becoming victims of cybercrime. That is why MiKSMedia offers free consultations. Don’t wait! Schedule one today!

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