Description: This is a blog post talking about popular scams, and is meant to make you aware of the potential scams that are commonly used to steal personal data.
Introduction
Website security is important when it comes to protecting your site. One of the main things that website security is supposed to protect you from are scams. Various types of scamming such as phishing, can make a website vulnerable to malicious malware, which are types of software used to damage a system. Some examples of malware are ransomware (malicious software that blocks access until a sum of money is paid), viruses, trojan horses (malware disguised as legitimate programs) and its worms (parts of a Trojan horse that self-replicate). Those are just a few, there’s many other types of malwares and popular scams that can affect your website in ways you wouldn’t even expect.
Phishing
One of the most known types of scamming, and most popular scams is phishing. This is where people act like another person to reveal someone’s personal information. They’re commonly shown in emails and other types of messages, and they can be relatively simple to avoid if you pay attention. Phishing emails can be done well though, so even if you were to pay attention there’s a chance that you missed something. So, the most important thing you should do is verify where that message is coming from.
Identifying Phishing
Microsoft goes over different ways to identify a phishing email, and here’s some of them.
Urgency in popular scams
Besides that, there’s ways to identify phishing on your own. Mostly in emails, phishing will show elements of urgency. They’ll make it seem like you have a limited amount of time to complete the tasks they’re asking you to do, which evokes emotions and can create a false sense of urgency. As a result, a person could feel like the message is important and they need to complete the tasks as soon as possible.
Identifying the sender in popular scams
Another sign of fishing is based on the sender. If you don’t recognize the sender, or have never received an email from that sender, that can be a way to identify a phishing email. Look at it carefully, sometimes you could be receiving valuable information from someone new. So again, you’ll want to confirm just to be as safe as possible.
More obvious ways to spot out a phishing email is the use of bad grammar, misspelled words, and suspicious links/attachments. Yes, people make mistakes, but emails are usually used in a professional manner so bad grammar and misspelled words should be uncommon. Therefore, if you see some it’s likely that it’s phishing. Either that or someone didn’t re-check their email, I’ve seen a few of those from people I knew. As for links and attachments, if you’re on a computer, sometimes you can hover over a link, and it’ll show you the full address. Really, you shouldn’t click on any type of random link, but hovering over to see the full address is a great first step. Often, there’s misspellings in the link or the link just looks suspicious.
Impersonation Scams
Out of the popular scams, impersonation is reoccurring. Whether a company impersonates you, someone you trust, a business partner, etc. puts your business and site at risk. I’ve seen posts of random people advertising a product as if it was their own. Sometimes, this impersonation makes it hard to find out which account or site is the official one. Especially those that have high followers, because someone might assume they’re real because they have an audience. Those followers may be fake, and if you click through their account, you’ll see that there’s a lack of interaction and there’s really no face of the brand.
Conclusion
Scamming can negatively impact your business relatively easily if that scammer or virus is able to breach your website. That not only puts your business at risk, but also any customers information you may have stored is at risk. As a result, being aware of the types of scams, and how to prevent them is essential to keeping your site protected. To learn more about malware and security, check out these blogs I wrote. One is on powerful cybersecurity trends, and the other is on form security which goes over personally identifiable information. Thank you for reading!