An email is a communication tool that most people use on a daily basis, and because of this, we need to know how to secure our mailboxes properly.
Cyber security threats are always present and rogue individuals are always looking for creative ways to get more victims.
In this article, we will look at what email forgery is and the steps we can take to protect our mailbox today.
What is Email Spoofing?
Email forgery is the general term used to describe malicious emails that have been created to look like they came from somewhere else. The purpose of email forgery is to enable the recipient to act on the email and trust the source because it appears to be legitimate.
Some of these emails may be marked as unwanted by your mailbox host and some you will notice that they are scams by the way they ask you for money. However, there are more dangerous and complex scams on the market that seek information.
A popular e-commerce site that you have registered with may ask you to enter your credentials in a link to their site. However, this could come from a scammer who has designed a header in an email for the impersonation of the shopping site and the link could be a landing page to make everything look genuine.
This is getting even worse in the business world, because even executives are now targeting phishing scams in an attempt to gain access to business systems and finances.
The people behind these attacks can steal your credentials, your money, control of your system. Some links aren't even designed to record your credit data, but instead, they will install malware on your system.
This is why it is important to keep your system secure, through Office 365 security or through multiple features. security of the email.
The good news is that there are many ways to avoid being spoofed via email.
Start with your filters
Your first line of defense against such messages is to maximize the adjustment of junk settings. Most email providers have a built-in spam filter, which can remove most of the threats in your inbox. It also helps you focus on real-time emails from real people, as it also blocks out a lot of promotional material.
Add registration Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
An SPF record lets the servers of your mail recipients know that the email your server sends them is not spam. Your recipient's server will check whether the message originating from your server matches the one at domain you.
Make sure you are using DKIM
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an encryption template in the header of a message. When a server receives the message, it allows it to check if someone has lost the email during the transfer. This is another template you can combine, allowing your SPF to minimize the risk of counterfeiting.
Carefully check the sender information
If the message claims to be an official source but has an email address that you can get for free from Google, then it probably is not official. You need to learn to control the headers of your email. You can extract the sender's IP address through the header and do a reverse IP search to verify who sent you first.
Do not share your personal information
Make sure you avoid sending personal information via email, whether it is for financial transactions or private matters. Also, do not give out your email address to people or organizations you just know.
Do not let your curiosity be fatal to you
Avoid doing click to links that you are not familiar with or that may appear suspicious. Make sure you haven't downloaded attachments from people you don't know. When you decide to download attachments, make sure you scan them first for malware.
Never take your cyber security needs for granted. We live in a world instantly connected to the internet that you depend on technology, but we must also learn to keep ourselves safe.
Being vigilant will always be our first line of defense against cybercriminals who want to take advantage of us.
