Phishing email is the most efficient, easy and cheapest way to get sensitive information from people or compromise an employee’s account. Normally hackers are looking for important information like bank accounts, credit card numbers or some identification information like SIN number or companies’ confidential information. If your account has been compromised, there are ways to stop hackers but if you notice late then that might be a long process of work. Also, it depends how you have been hacked with that phishing email. Did you provide sensitive information like your credentials or installed a malware on your computer from that phishing email?
What is phishing email?
The way that hackers send emails out blindly to find a victim, called phishing. A phishing email is one that is sent to a recipient with the intent of forcing the recipient to perform a specific task. To make their email appear genuine, the attacker may employ social engineering techniques. It’s quite frightening how much information you can find out about someone on the Internet without having to hack databases or trick someone into disclosing confidential information. Hackers can quickly gather personal information from social media sites, professional profiles, and other online publications to identify the triggers that people respond to. Hackers send fake emails from a company (PayPal, Microsoft), social media (Facebook, LinkedIn) or person who you might know and ask you to click on the link, open an attachment to infect your computer or redirect you to a fake website and ask you for credentials to login. By doing that you provide access to hackers and they might get access to your sensitive information.
How to detect phishing emails?
There are different ways to detect it but the easiest way for the normal users is as follow:
- Who is the sender? You should always look at the sender’s name and make sure the sender email address is also relevant to sender. An example of not relevant could be From: James Robert j123wut@coswwe459.com
- Always make sure about spelling of sender email address. Sometimes hackers send emails from different domains but it looks like a legitimate email like rgill@Microsofte.com or rgill@linkeedin.com
- Normally phishing emails is poorly written and it contains poor spelling and grammar.
- It includes suspicious link or infected attachments. If an email comes with no attachments or suspicious link but it includes one of the first mentioned three items above, it might be looking for a victim for the most sophisticated phishing email.
- For the suspicious link you can hover your mouse on it and see what the real link address is. It should be from the same domain as written and not from a random string. An example would be like the link below to subscribe. Subscribe Me
- Phishing emails has a sense of emergency to put you in a situation to don’t think twice and just click on the link and follow what hackers want. For instance, it says you must take an immediate action or your account would be disable. Another instance is you have some important missing emails, and you should reply immediately.
Stop phishing/spam emails
What have been said is all about the manual process of how we can detect phishing emails. You should know that there are a lot of IT solutions out there to help you or your company to spend your time on more important projects than validate and stop phishing email. Before we go ahead and introduce you some of those solutions, we need be familiar with some terms as below.
What is spam filtering and why we need that?
Spam filters detect and block unsolicited, unwanted, and virus-infected emails (also known as spam). Spam filters are intended to detect unsafe emails sent by hackers or marketers. Attackers frequently use email messages that claim to provide a valuable service or to protect you from imminent danger.
According to studies, 14.5 billion spam emails are being sent every day, earning their senders an average of $7,000 per day. 46 percent of emails, according to the same study, are spam. That’s a lot of potentially harmful information!
Spam email recipients will be protected by an appropriate spam filter from possible threats. They can block viruses and phishing scams, as well as separate safe emails from spam.
How Does a Spam Filter Work?
Spam filters are available as software, hosted services, or on-premises appliances. Spam filters employ “heuristic” techniques, which involve subjecting each email to thousands of sets of rules (algorithms). Each rule consists of assigning score to the message’s likelihood of being spam. If the score reaches a certain limit, the email is flagged as spam and the sender is prevented from proceeding.
Anti-spam is made up of the following components:
- Whitelists
- Blacklists
- spam databases
- URL verification
- transaction history
- heuristic analysis
- SPF configuration
Also, it is good to know that we have free spam filters which might be ideal for personal use. A paid spam filter will provide the highest level of protection for your computer or network and email accounts. They will be more meticulous in their scanning and analyzing procedures.
Some of the known spam filters
- Symantec Email Security Cloud
- MailWasher
- Spameo
- SolarWinds
- Avanan
- SpamTitan
- Spameo
- Zerospam
- Comodo
Most of these solutions provide a good protection but no solutions are perfect. You should always have an option to try any solution for at least a few keeps or months to be able to evaluate it. Otherwise, it might be better to stay with a solution that you have. Also depends on your company’s nature, different solutions might have different result. For example, if you have a marketing company, some solution might work better than other solution due to their detection rules and engines.
Conclusion
A reliable and consistent email spam filtering solution can aid in the prevention of cyber security risks posed by spam email that can infiltrate your network and information. To secure your privacy, systems, and files, you can use any of the above-mentioned spam filtering and protection solutions.