spear-phishing-attacks

How To Prevent Spear Phishing Attacks

In our last article, we talked about the latest current events on how email spoofing and spear phishing attacks are costing the U.S. economy big money. Hackers are sending out fake emails to unsuspecting victims. These false emails that are being sent out may look exactly like a familiar email address of someone you know well. This email address could even be a clone of the person messaging you. This technique of cloning someones email address is called email spoofing.

When you receive a spoofed email, there is always an agenda behind it. This agenda of a hacker pretending to be someone their not. They are trying to squeeze some sort of personal information out of you through these spear phishing attacks. Information that most hackers are interested in could be bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, user names, passwords, your full name, your address, and so on. They might even be trying to get someone else’s information out of you through their phishing attempt as well.

Regardless of the reasons on why hackers want to steal your personal information, these attacks can be very harmful! This is why we will be showing you how to spot phishing attacks, and how to block emails on the most popular email service providers such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, and even hotmail.com.

Yes you heard me right when I said hotmail.com! The majority of email users still use a Hotmail account which is now outlook.com for their email services. Ok sorry for that little side rant, but knowing how to block Hotmail emails will be useful for those who don’t know and still use this Microsoft email service.

Ok, so let’s get down to business. I will show you real world spoofed email addresses, and actual examples on how I was attacked through one of these spear phishing attacks.

Example 1: Federal Express Spear Phishing Attacks

This is a spoofed email from a sender claiming to be from Federal Express. The email looks legit, but it was one of many types of spear phishing attacks. I will break down an explanation of the email:

---

Subject: FedEx #46358
From: Federal Express
To: youremailaddress@hotmail.com
Thu 1/1/2016 12:00 AM

FedEx No.46358

We have sent you a message.

We have sent you a message with the required information.

Have trouble reading this email?
Click here to open this email in your browser.