Misuse of e-mail address by spammer
Not funny, but not dramatic neither: yesterday I noticed that a cybercriminal and spammer is using my name as sender address for a currently ongoing spam wave. Due to the fact that my e-mail account has not been hacked and just the e-mail address is used, there is nothing that can be done to stop this wave.
However, I take this opportunity to raise awareness for the following basic rules:
1. never click on a link you are not absolutely sure where it gets you to (the link name is not relevant);
2. do not open suspicious e-mails in html format, as the html functionality could already start a chain that leads to malicious code (if you want to read such an e-mail, switch reading format to plain text first);
3. never answer to a suspicious e-mail;
4. even if you know the sender, be aware that someone else could use the identity for, e.g., a targeted attack;
5. you determine the pace of e-mail communication and not vice versa (stay in control of quantity and quality, and dare to leave e-mails unanswered in favor of rules 1 to 5).
The above approach shall support your efforts to experience the positive side of e-mail communication while managing the risk of the negative side...
Free Visual Artist, retired Digital Transformation, Strategy and Sustainability Consultant
8 年A simple and quick additional check, that can help detect some fake senders, is looking to the SMTPdomain of the sender detail (someone@SMTPdomain) above all if misspelled or not the usual one. If you are able to look at the details about the message sender you can also check that "mailed-by:" and "signed-by:" fields match the sender domain. Good and updated antispam filters both in service (not all providers are equal) and client (junk mail filter) help in defending himself. I agree that the most important factor to protect himself from phishing is behavioral: "think before clicking”, for example: Notice if the language sounds personal and correct. Hover your mouse over a link in a message to see a preview of the link URL in the status bar, then check to see if the link site matches the site that it should be from. I think that we should learn from misuse of public (or easy to retrieve) available private e-mail addresses to look forward to the importance of privacy protection, also in our choices such as when and where we decide to accept and enable cookies or provide data about ourselves. The increased use of a "digital identity" and the amount of data that can be easily collected for profiling user from web, social media and IoT is a great opportunity but also a serious risk because not all the users are aware of it. Thanks for sharing your advices!