Protecting Yourself From Phishing

Phishing is the practice when fraudsters pretend to be from an established, well-known company, organization or even government agency. These fraudsters then contact consumers and essentially try to trick them into revealing personal information.

Once the fraudsters have hold of that information, they can then commit fraud, like opening new accounts in your name or even taking over current accounts like banking or apps. This is something that can happen over the phone, by email or even through text messaging. You can protect yourself with these quick, helpful tips:

• Try to avoid sharing. Don’t give personal or financial information by an email, text or over the phone.
• Always be on the lookout. You should only open emails, attachments, and links from people you know.
• Don’t take the bare minimum as the real deal. Stealing colors, logos and headers of a popular organization is very easy to do!
• Legitimate companies don’t ask for personal information via pop-up boxes or screens, watch out for this approach.
• Hover over any links. Check out a website’s URL or links by hovering over the link to see exactly where they lead prior to clicking.
• If you’ve received an email and you are unsure whether it’s legitimate or not, try to verify by contacting the company directly. Don’t respond to an email asking if the email is legitimate. If you receive an email that is suspicious and it seems like phishing, you can forward this email to phishing@visa.com. Or you can forward the email to the Federal Trade Commission at space@uce.gov.
• Install a phishing filter on your email and/or web browser. These filters cannot keep out all phishing emails or messages; they do, however, reduce the number of attempts.
• Keep your devices up to date on anti-virus software.

Protecting your personal information is a round-the-clock effort that takes persistence and a keen eye. If you want more information on cybersecurity, visit: https://us-cert.cisa.gov/.